Gallagher pad is a rocking good buy

GREENBANKS is a contender for Cork house sale of the year. It isn’t just the link with local rock legend, the late Rory Gallagher, whose mother lived here for several decades: the house and its grounds are in a class of their own.

Although dated, the solid and sound c1930s house Greenbanks has property pedigree in spades, and a stellar suburban location as a trump card.

It is on three-quarters of an acre of private grounds, with ponds, pergola, patio and paving running down from the well-heeled Well Road to the bulrushes of Douglas Estuary, and it bounds the Mahon golf club on its western side with Douglas tennis club visible in the distance. Best views by far are from the master bedroom’s bay window and adjoining bedroom balcony, but just about every room revels in the estuarine, yet suburban, setting.

It was clearly built day one without too much worry about budgets, and is a place that got on quietly about its business of comfortably accommodating family needs without too much ostentation.

Done in the ‘English Style’ it has oak aplenty, on floors and even on dark panelled walls in the hall and sitting room, there’s stained glass features too, and up to 3,000 sq ft of living space. This includes four fine bedrooms, all with bright views, and one en suite, three spacious and well-placed reception rooms with favourable aspects, and kitchen with a network of covered or courtyard rooms linking into a garage.

Coming up for sale at a time of unprecedented national wealth, it is likely to see lots more cash lavished in modernising, but has so much going for it that it will repay almost any investment.

It has a guide price of €1.5 million quoted by Brian Olden, a new director at Cohalan Downing auctioneers, but for many would-be buyers that is only part of the picture: also on sale is a site of less than a quarter of an acre in front of Greenbanks, on the Well Road, with a separate guide price of €500,000. It is almost a ‘must-have’ banker for whoever buys Greenbanks (the site has a long planning saga, and a part-built house there in breach of planning was eventually bought back by the late Mrs Mona (Monica) Gallagher and torn down.

What to do with the site? Keep it as retirement option, perhaps, or act on the original, hand-coloured garden landscape designs for the property and put a tennis court here?