Number 9 South Anne Street, a hundred yards off Grafton Street, with the date on the front and the window boxes doing most of the talking. Green and red at street level, four floors of plain grey above it, flowers the whole way up.
Kehoe's was first licensed in 1803. The interior you walk into now is a Victorian refit finished towards the end of the 1800s, and the reason it is worth writing about is that almost nothing has been done to it since.
It was a shop as well
Irish pubs were routinely grocers too, and Kehoe's still has the counter to prove it. Behind the low grocery counter are the original mahogany drawers, which held rice, tea, coffee and snuff. You could buy your provisions and drink at the same time, and the snug has the serving hatch and the buzzer that made that possible without anyone having to be seen.
That is the part most people miss. The snug is not a quaint feature. It is a piece of social machinery, built so that a woman, a priest, a guard or anyone else who could not be seen drinking in public could drink in private and be served through a hatch.
The literary bit, handled honestly
In the 1940s and 1950s the bar was drunk in by Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Myles na gCopaleen. That is true, and it is on every list of Dublin literary pubs, so it is not exactly a discovery.
The better version of the story is the proprietor's. John Kehoe ran what the pub itself describes as a strict and conservative house, and tolerated that particular crowd mainly in the quieter morning hours. The writers were not the point of the place. They were something the landlord put up with.
Why we drew it
Because it is a building that is almost entirely front. Four floors of flat grey doing nothing at all, and then a ground floor and a set of window boxes carrying the whole thing. Take the flowers away and there is not much to look at, which is the opposite of how most buildings work.
Seven colours, laid flat, brush marks left showing.
John Kehoe, Dublin, is in the Pub Series.
The Pub Series is a set of Irish pub fronts drawn one at a time. We go and look at the building, we read what we can find about it, and we say plainly which bits we could not verify.