Sit-com and go.

By Tommy Barker

Writer Tom Gabbay and his wife Julia, an interior designer, renovated a West Cork farmstead with the aspiration “of leaving it to our grandchildren,” but now family needs see them returning to New York.

Tom - who turned 50 on April 1 (supply the Fool’s Day quips yourself, but don’t think he hasn’t heard them all by now - he’s a professional, after all) worked on NBC comedy series like Cheers, Alf, Family Ties, the Cosby Show, Empty Nest and others in the late 1980s when he was director of comedy for the station.

Later, as well as trying his own hand at writing movie scripts, he moved to London to work on a joint venture, the Wanderer, starring Brian Brown, with ITV, and there he met his wife-to-be Julia.

Having done the Hollywood thing and then the London thing where Julia worked on major interior design projects, well, really the only thing left to do was the West Cork thing.

“We came over in 1997, it was our first trip to West Cork and wanted to get away from the Hollywood scene,” says Tom, who says they also considered lots of other country locations in the UK as well but were charmed by the ease of lifestyle and pace in West Cork.

“When we hit Clonakilty we fell in love with the place, it was so beautiful,” he says.

They stumbled across an old farm house and out-buildings at Blind Harbour, near Reen and Union Hall, and decided to take on it restoration along with input from architect Denis O’Donovan in Bantry.

They worked on the house initially remotely, from London, then Tom came over on site and it was “18 months of pain, but worth it.”

The couple’s two children, Max and Sophie, were born here, becoming Bons babies, and as the house and out-buildings complex came together (the sales brochure succinctly describes it as a compound) Julia and Tom found their roots here deepening in an embracing West Cork community with residents from many countries and continents.

During their sojourn, Tom Gubbay managed to write a few spy thrillers and one is due to be published later this year but doesn’t have an Irish angle. The Irish stuff will probably leak out in years to come, he suspects.

Despite the unexpected need to sell up to move back Stateside where Tom has grown-up children, they hope to get a smaller West Cork home for visits as this five-bedroomed Blind Harbour home on five acres is simply too big to keep for occasional use.

Their stone, slate and mortar labour of love with a nurtured veg garden is on the market with Ray O’Neill and Aidan Murphy of Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill, with a 795,000 price tag. It reflects not only the amount of developed accommodation here (it could make three separate houses) but also the quality of the work done and attention to detail.

Julia gets full credit for one of the best moves done to the old house, putting in a lofted gallery above one of the main reception rooms with skylights to flood the room with light, contrasting with the darker rooms where windows are small and old stone walls a couple of feet thick.

The complex now has the original restored farmhouse, the adjoining dairy with high-ceilinged space and giving a total of five bedrooms and a mix of living rooms and several staircases and a separate converted stables dwelling, with 600 sq ft and suitable for guests or as a home office.

Features include teak joinery outside, mahogany doors inside and mahogany kitchen worktops, a Canadian elm staircase, pitch pine floors and hefty exposed beams as well as Italian ‘tumble tile’ floors.

In pride of place is the enormous black cooking Perrott range in the living room which came to Union Hall on the first ever West Cork train to Skibbereen in 1877 (the line closed April 1, 1961 - now that’s April Foolishness) and was manhandled the rest of the way to this seaside farmhouse overlooking chic Castletownshend.

The renovations were sympathetically done, using natural materials and retaining as much of the original features as possible.

But also included were modern conveniences like underfloor heating, internet access and satellite dish - for the widescreen TV and sound system, so Tom “a political news junkie” can keep up with news from home and follow the shenanigans in the West Wing - both real White House goings on and the TV series of which he’s an avid fan.