Join the Jetty Set

Tommy Barker is impressed with this ultra-modern waterside property.

ONCE, oh about the 1960s, there was the Jet Set. Now, air travel is easy as pie, and the merit is in taking things slow and easy. Welcome to the Jetty Set.

The Grain Store personifies the lifestyle, giving a West Cork twist to that international attraction, waterside living.

There’s already an international clique living here along the county’s waterways (oh, all right, lets drag out the names Puttnam, Irons et al one more time) but now Irish buyers too will be bidding on this most liveable and covetable of ‘island’ homes.

The converted stone property has 180-year-old workmanlike roots, updated from the day when it stored 1,000 tonnes of grain. It has up to 7,000 sq ft of space (including the triple car lofted garage) and large volume rooms, but internally it is contemporary to its steel and glazed core, wired up to the web from no fewer than 90 optional high-speed sockets.

But, slow down, slow down. It has a quarter mile of water frontage and its own beach, pontoon and deep water mooring on to the Ilen River estuary. Baltimore village is four miles by road, less by water, and the converted stone and Bangor slate-hung property is six miles from the well-served market town of Skibbereen.

Cork airport is 60 miles away, for those who can peel themselves away from this island retreat with causeway and bridge access.

It is not just the €3 million price with local agents Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill, with Hamilton Osborne King in Cork and with Knight Frank in the UK which makes this an easily-reached yet place apart: the quality of design, decor and detail is there to be seen, felt, and savoured.

Too often, converted and period buildings in this country can suffer from lack of light, as the small windows of the day add to gloomy wintertime woes. No such problem here as light floods all of the main rooms, and in particular the central atrium with its bifurcated staircase in well-crafted steel and glass. Treads are 3” slabs of polished concrete, a good match for the hall’s mellow and smooth Indian sandstone, and the hand rails are painted the same muted mulberry colour as the feature entrance door and the glazing frames.

Light drenches the important places: the huge drawing room is closest to the water’s edge, with views over the reclaimed and back-filled/mass concrete sea wall/jetty from three sides thanks to the walls of windows.

Next to this is a media room, wired for projector and large wall-mounted plasma screen, with discrete Bose speakers pumping up the volume. There’s CAT 5 cabling here, and the space was designed for video-conferencing and electronic links to the wider world.

A formal dining room is next up on the way to the kitchen, which has sleek units and island in a warm-to-the-touch foil which belie the cool image. A modern Scan solid fuel stove keeps a family room off the kitchen cosy, topping up the efficient geothermal underfloor heating, while the super-thick stone walls act as important heat sumps.

A sturdy steel-framed conservatory open up views from this hearth of the house, and though the owner swears he’s not into boys’ toys, there’s fun to be had using the infra-red remote to control the sophisticated track lighting here.

The ten phone lines, water and other services had to be run up the half mile of wending driveway (though electronic gates) and it was ‘future-proofed’ to allow some 90 outlets be easily switched from computer to phone to TV to internet port use.

All five en suite bathrooms have power showers, while the walk-in shower in the apartment-like master suite resembles a glass bus shelter, albeit a structure designed to keep the water in, not out.

Two of the bedrooms have mezzanine areas and one has separate external access from a stone gable staircase, and so is ideal for independent off-spring, au-pairs or others. Then again, the house-sized detached triple garage has obvious conversion potential too, subject to planning.

Put up for sale this month as the owners need to spend more time in the UK and will or buy or build back there (but are on the look-out for a smaller West Cork base too) The Grain Store will have an appeal to a wealthy Irish elite as well as to a mobile and international market.

There’s hardly a been a corner cut in this conversion job, with a lot of imported product and materials worked on by a crew that saw over 200 people involved at various levels over a three-year project.

The Grain Store is more than the sum of its parts; as a building it is superb, add in the setting and it is sublime. Anchors aweigh.