Impressive Bandon home comes with option on four house sites

DEER recently disported in the gardens of Summerhill House, one of the few period houses right on the doorstep of Bandon town in west Cork.

Elevated above the town along a back road towards Innishannon, and a five to 10-minute walk back to the bridge, Summerhill House originally stood on quite a few agricultural acres.

It is being sold on a more manageable half-acre site, and the equally approachable price of €750,000, via Mark Kelly and Anne Marie Kennedy of Lisney, reflects its reduced footprint. A lawnmower now, not a private herd of deer, can keep the grounds in trim

Dating to the late 1800s, Summerhill House has been home in recent decades to a local businessman and his family who are now ‘downsizing’ for a quieter life, though the new home they’ve built alongside isn’t a whole lot smaller.

A few years ago, a portion of the grounds to the west here were sold for a small housing scheme. As a final throw of the development dice, the sound and squarely-built Summerhill is a new market offering with the option to buy a sloping elevated 1.5 acres with full planning permission granted for four very contemporary-styled new homes of over 3,000 sq ft each.

Those sites, once serviced, would be individually worth well over €250,000 each, and the approximate added cost of the four sites is put by Lisney at €1 million plus.

The preference is to sell Summerhill and the four house sites together, but offers will also be accepted on lots, say the agents.

Except for a bit of personal decorative tweaking, Summerhill is a walk-in job. This is thanks to constant investment in insulation/dry-lining, damp proofing, extension and upgrades. There’s none of the sloping floors and creaking boards often associated with houses of this vintage.

Unusually, the hallway has a terrazzo floor, and the main reception rooms have pristine dark parquet wood floors.

There’s about 2,700 sq ft of space, with a formal dining room, a high ceilinged drawing room, family room, big kitchen/dining room with tiled floor and overhead large pitch pine beams, as well as a utility, inner hall and guest WC.

There are four good first floor bedrooms, and the master bedroom has an en suite reached via a high-ceilinged dressing room.

The specification throughout is fully up to today’s house hunting standards, and one of the strong selling points is a landscaped west-facing patio garden.