Medics and university have eye on Brookfield Lodge

By Tommy Barker

The lodge to the mid-1800s Brookfield House on Cork city's College Road is going to see University College Cork, doctors and possibly a few other private buyers all in hot pursuit.

Location isn't just the cliched description 'prime:' it is strategic for more than a few vested interests, none more so than UCC.

The college bought the four-storey Brookfield House itself five years ago for almost €4.4 million, and it is now poised to be the centrepiece of a new €44 million, 125,000 sq ft nursing and medical sciences building in the mature, riverside grounds.

The profile of this College Road strip is increasingly academic/medical with the Bon Secours second-next-door.

Ironically, one of the last remaining stretches of highly valuable land here belongs to the Poor Clares enclosed and meditative order.

UCC also plans to link its Brookfield medical/nursing faculty with its contemporary designed wings on either side of the old house to a €80 million IT building to be built on the Western Road via a bridge.

All around College Road investors snap up houses for letting to students, developers, and UCC are bringing on purpose-built Section 50 student accommodation.

(Brookfield Village student/tourist apartments/hotel/leisure centre built in part of the wooded former grounds is a neighbouring success story.)

Medics buy up the bigger houses around here either for family homes or for conversion to surgeries/consulting rooms.

Needless to say, such strength of wealth for property hunting makes family owner-occupier purchasers a particular challenge, and is a source of dismay to long-time residents as they observe the inevitability of change.

Back to the past: Brookfield House wasbuilt a century and a half ago by the Jennings family, who had a lucrative mineral waters business and extensive estates of hundreds of now suburbanised acres.

Unusually, the large, stolid and relatively architecturally undistinguished house is built of yellow London firebrick (as is the lodge), with a 55,000 gallon water tank encased in slim lead lining up on the roof as a cistern/reservoir in case of fire: a blaze underneath would melt the lead, water would cascade down...end of threat.

Internal doors are steel lined, and walls and stairs are fireproof as the original Jennings occupants were obsessed by the fear of fire, according to a source associated with the house.

Ground rents are still collected by the estate from properties close to St Finn Barre's Cathedral, Sunday's Well, the Lee Road, Carrigrohane, and the back Model Farm Road.

Nearby Orchard Road, where the last house to sell made almost 1 million, is so called because it was the orchard for the Jennings business, and a second smaller orchard was located on Farranlea Road, while some of the oldest houses in the vicinity were staff homes for employees of the Jennings. One of the nicest, a stone-built home, is a former stables.

The Coomber family, now cutting its last links with Brookfield House and Lodge, acknowledge that the estate was a major presence in Cork's western suburbs for centuries.

A Coomber family member lived in the grand but not particularly attractive house up to a few years ago, and another family member was responsible for the tastefully discrete renovations and extension to the lodge.

The lodge, with 1,700 sq ft of space, is on the market since the start of February with Billy Casey of Casey and Kingston auctioneers with a €500,000-plus price guide.

New teak windows with double glazing have been put in, there are some small feature window opes created on a gable wall and behind the guts of one side wall were removed, with a steel RSJ inserted over a large picture window overlooking the walled-in back garden.

Design credit goes largely to the sensitive input of architect Peter Murphy (his most famous client is Castlehyde's Michael Flatley) and delivery from builder Morgan O'Neill who created a usable space out of what was a tiny lodge.

The sleek decor and finish is to the vendor's credit, with a muted interior, with pale colours throughout, enhanced with high quality fittings and furnishings.

There are reclaimed pine floors in the two main reception rooms imported from Scotland. Yellow pine is used for the stairs and gallery landing, and a Velux on the landing to the front draws in light from the south.

The lodge has two bedrooms, one very large, a first floor bathroom, and galley style kitchen with white painted units, cream Aga cooker and granite worktops.

Currently, the lodge is a domestic idyll, but with a proposed sale signalled, changes of use have just been put on the front boiler.