Splash out on a West Cork labour of love

Tommy Barker says unrivalled scenery enhances this unique home.

WHAT is "a good decent stream" in summer turns into a bit of a torrent in winter - and causes a waterfall on the Owngarrif River near Castletownbere to roar into life.

And, the rocky stream gushing around the wooded knoll here gives this scenic area, a part-time home to writer and movie maker Neil Jordan, its Waterfall name.

Superb scenery is par for the course in this neck of the Beara peninsula, and that's part of the reason why a new six-star hotel is now being created by the ruins of Dunboy Castle and the old Puxley mansion: helicopters are about to join fishing trawlers as a familiar sight, and the area is set to take-off and find an appreciative audience on a world stage.

An earlier arrival to the area was the Dutch Van Etten family, and furniture maker and craft worker Danny Van Etten came to Waterfall, Castletownbere with his parents 27 years ago. His wife Eilis, from Cork city, who is an art teacher locally, is a more recent blow-in with just 21 years down west to date.

The couple married 12 years ago and are selling up the sea-view home, a veritable labour of love, they built slowly since then three miles on the Cork side of Castletownbere. Having worked a house into spectacular contours, they are prepared to uproot from house, woods and waterfall for a 'Grand Tour' abroad. They'll even cast off from their boat moorings, close to the end of the gardens for the trip.

The place they are vacating is a unique product, a melange of buildings on an acre of ground, with most notably a hip-roofed residence in an entirely naturalistic setting, with some naturalistic cedar sheeting, topped off by a distinctive dovecote-like chimney pot.

But, before Eilis and Danny built this home they first built a comfortable chalet, which was their family home for a number of years during the build project. Their daughter Julie spent most of her childhood here, and Danny fashioned a marvellously evocative ship's cabin bed (pictured) here for her. In all, the chalet has 700 sq ft of space, including a living room/kitchen with warming solid fuel stove, sun room and bedroom plus bathroom.

By comparison, the main house has almost double the space, about 1,300 sq ft in all, with a large first floor master bedroom plumbed for en suite facilities, a ground floor bedroom and bathroom, and then pretty much an open plan and stepped layout with as a centrepiece a large bulwark of chimney breast, a real heat store at the heart of the home.

Danny Van Etten did virtually all of the work, from foundations up, to the last shaped and cut slates on the pagoda-ish roof which made sizeable carpentry challenges. He also made the kitchen and fashioned the cut-out or recessed alcove shelving over the window, a design feature that cost time to create.

The main house, carefully sited and designed to mimic the vertical lines of mountains and hills in view here, integrates successfully into its setting. It has traditional block walls, but with double layers of insulation. There are some cedar-clad extensions, and the cedar looks right at home here against a wooded backdrop, in contrast to the current vogue for cedar sheeting on city apartments.

The Waterfall property, with the waterfall of gurgling note, also has a fine, stand-alone utility which houses the central heating boiler, plus a work store, and it has two selling agents, Andrew Moore & Co in Cork city, and Sherry FitzGerald Daly in Kenmare.

It is guided at €700,000, and the agents say it is a one-off that will absolutely suit the right buyer.

Possibly it will be bought as a luxury holiday home, as a retirement home for an active retiree and the chalet gives breathing room for guests and drop-in visitors.

Or, it may have some niche commercial uses too, given the beauty of its setting, with native planting that includes old oak, hazel, arbutus, sweet chestnut, silver birch, holly and rhododendron: it could be an ideal spa centre, and in fact provision has been made for a hot-tub and sauna in the grounds.

Or, there's always the bracing option of a dip in the stream and a drenching shower in the cataract-like waterfall.