€1.375m price tag for ‘labour of love’ home

Not a single Cork City home sold in 2014 for more than €1m. But, now, a 16-year-old Rochestown house is hoping to break that dry spell.

No 3 Eyrecourt is just up for sale, it’s absolutely ready to walk into — once you don’t need a 90% mortgage — and it confidently carries a €1.375m price tag.

Going unseasonally to market yesterday, was the large and lofty architect-designed home, a gated niche development adjacent to Garryduff Sport Centre and Mount Oval Village.

Cork’s leafy and affluent Rochestown has some of the second city’s most expensive houses; here, the modestly-titled No 3 is being sold by an IT business consultant and electronics guru aged in his 60s and his family, as they trade down to a new-build.

Despite the owner’s background in IT and all things electronic, it’s remarkably understated and bling-free, though it’s quality from the underfloor heating and oiled oak floors all the way up to its lofted 700sq ft snooker and games room over the double garages.

It does, of course, have data-chomping CAT 5 cabling for all things IT, but equally it has more prosaic (and as useful) family-friendly facilities like central vacuum and a laundry chute, a games room as well as a national school across the road and a sports centre next door.

Cue the latest “Roy Keane house-hunt” rumours?

Back in the 2000s, at least two of Rochestown’s oldest and finest houses, each on acres of gardens, sold for €4m, while another classic sold two years ago for around €1.5m.

Hoping to hit that latter sort of level is the ‘teenage’ No 3 Eyrecourt, on its rapidly maturing grounds, lushly planted and painstakingly maintained.

It’s one of five big houses within Eyrecourt, but in size, design and finish terms is head and shoulders over the other four.

Listed at €1.375m by Sherry FitzGerald, it was built behind a second set of access gates, as a one-off, with six bedrooms and 6,000sq ft of understated luxury inside, on all three levels, and is on 0.8 acre of shrubbed, walled and secure grounds outside.

With an attached double garage, front gravel drive with fountain and rear garden pond No 3 is on a double-sized site within Eyrecourt.

Here, the other four houses were developed by a Howard Holdings-related company, designed by UK architect Mitchell Evans, as Howard made one of their first assertive forays into the Cork market.

Just before the market crashed in 2006, Howard Holdings paid €10m for a six-acre site at Cleve Hill, Blackrock, suggesting they’d build 18 Eyrecourt-inspired houses there (that Cleve Hill site’s still for sale).

No 3 Eyrecourt was designed by Cork-based architect Derek Tyner, and has a sort of UK Surrey country home look to the front, and a more distinctive rear with bespoke glazing over a sun-room, looking over a pond, patio and a profusion of planting.

Sherry FitzGerald’s listing describes it as “a labour of love”, and adds there’s also a working market garden and custom-built glasshouse, a feature gazebo, meandering foot-paths, split level patios and stocked ponds.