Tie up at the Marina

THEY don't build houses like they used to. The thought comes constantly to mind wondering around a place as fine as Memling.

This muscular home, on Cork's Marina and called after a 15th Century Flemish painter, has quality in spades, inside and out, and shows all the signs of careful ownership, on-going investment and discrete modernisation.

Edwardian in provenance, dating to just after 1900, and with mellowed brick, dash and some ornamental plasterwork it is one of just a dozen or so houses at the Blackrock village end of the Marina. Blackrock Castle is visible from the front gates and upstairs bedrooms, while Tivoli is across the river with its shoulder of still-largely wooded hills flanking behind.

The majestic Marina is one of Cork's quietly appreciated amenity areas, home to sports from the GAA, the Showgrounds and rowing clubs and favoured by walkers and runners, a couple of easily navigated miles, by car, boat or on foot, downriver of the city centre. Not only is this area steeped into maritime history, it is also physically rooted in it - this section of the Marina is reclaimed ground with protecting quay walls only built in recent centuries.

Detached Memling's design is credited to architect Samuel Francis Hynes, and the row here has other houses by architect Arthur Hill, responsible for similar era homes on the main Douglas road and at Wellington Bridge as well.

On the market with Denis Guerin of Frank V Murphy & Company auctioneers with a €1.25 million-plus price guide, Memling has up to five bedrooms and accommodation over three floors. The maturity of the site masks just how much there is in this home at ground level alone: the vendors added on a multi-sided conservatory behind the two interlinked reception rooms to one side, and a light-flooded family room with south-facing wall of glass was set on the house's other flank.

In between, is a large 20' deep by 11' wide kitchen and breakfast room, with dark oil-fired Aga at the end, and units in elm and beech tops. A utility, guest loo and superb entrance hall with feature circular stained glass window rounds off the smartly-conceived and well-blended space at lower level and with good rear garden access.

There's a shower room and bed five or study off the wide stair return, the master bedroom is a good-size with deep bay window yielding views of the just conserved and renewed Blackrock Castle. It has a bank of built-ins and an en suite, and the other bedroom on this level have built-in storage, as do the top floor's final two bedrooms.

Site size is a good private quarter of an acre and south-facing, space which will be relatively easy to keep given the mature boundaries, with a feature old Scots Pine.