Georgian survivor with an air of genteel elegance
NOT a lot changed in Chiplee during its last owners’ half century here: simply, they lived here, loved it, had a great family life, and enjoyed every inch of it, inside and out, right down to the old building, Jenny’s House, for the pet donkey by its entrance gate.
As home to the late Cork art collectors Dr JB and Rhoda Kearney and their four children, this genuine family home housed a remarkable collection of top Irish art, by a list of great names as well as some famous world-class painters, but is in itself a bit of a faded canvas in need of sensitive restoration.
A personal portrait of the house has been photographically preserved in moody still-life images by a Kearney family member, bound in book form, as they prepare to hand it on to a new family.
A model of fine, but scuffed, modest Georgian elegance, the blue carpet on the exquisite cantilevered staircase serves as a visual metaphor for Chiplee’s lattermost decades. Not only is it worn away on the treads, but the treads themselves have been worn smooth as well by many thousands of footfalls. Nothing added, but time, to quote a line.
Ironically, for a house that was home to one of the more precious private paintings and art collections of any Irish family, the walls internally weren’t over-troubled by copious amounts of paint and decoration. One or two bedrooms got wallpapered with patterns that might have come straight out of the 1970s or a ROSC exhibition, but that’s about it.
No harm was done to the Georgian house either though.
It is a well-kept, sound, solid and upright but now faded, example of a Georgian residence, with a pedigree put at 1760 and further extended with a barrel-vault ceilinged library added in the 1830s, along with a raft of service rooms, plus a distinctive coach-house, annexe, all on a wooded private city suburban site of 1.5 acres.
Development has come in waves in an around Chiplee, since the 1760s, as Cork’s affluent middle and upper classes decamped to Blackrock and the hills north of the city and the River Lee.
It originally stood as a 15 acres demesne just a mile from Cork city, with walled gardens and formal grounds and shrubberies.
A contemporary account in 1809 of a month-long stay at Chiplee recalls a household then owned by the Harvey family and with hospitality, servants and comfort, while “the lawn is very handsome, with a bathing house at the bottom for the water is quite salt.”
The tides were literally pushed back from Chiplee’s northern boundary and reclaimed in the mid-1800s, and new house building encroached in waves, in the 1800s, 1900s and into the 2000s.
A modern mansion is being built in classical style and proportion alongside, screened by mature trees, and for the forseeable future Chiplee will continue to rest on its current 1.5 acres and laurels: a 2006 planning application by the estate of the late Dr JB Kearney for four detached new homes on a sloping portion of the remaining grounds was refused on the basis the house and its curtilege is now a protected structure, inside and outside.
Therein lies the possible rub.
Chiplee carries a €2.2 million price guide with estate agent Denis Guerin of Frank V Murphy and Co, and it could comfortably take spending of a further 1m or more. It doesn’t necessarily need all of that spending, but current tastes seem to dictate a blow-out renovation over living in a more genteel state datedness.
It has an array of stone-flagged basement rooms, all bright with windows, a wine cellar, and yards with tall garage/stablehouse. Again. there’s a fascinating selection of attic rooms, ideal for children, play rooms and dens, but just a bit too low-ceilinged for today’s generation of well-fed 6’ tall offspring to fully inhabit.
It has linked reception and inner halls beyond the pedimented entrance door with a cloak room/WC off, a passageway to the 1830s add-on containing a library, the main square block has two formal reception rooms with marble fireplaces, and a basic kitchen, redone in the 1960s.
Apart from the superb and sound cantilevered staircase, there’s a second service staircase which ends half way up the more formal steps, via a hidden doorcase. Like the main reception rooms, several of the four main first floor bedrooms have a dual aspect and old sash frames, there’s a main bathroom and a laundry room, while the attic level has a mix of rooms, plus a fabulous mauve-painted bathroom with ancient cast iron bath and wash hand basin.
Chiplee does have oil-fired central heating, after a fashion.
But, really, subject to the strictures of appropriate conservation, detached Chiplee and its acre and a half of grounds plus several buildings is a blank canvas and frame-work for a careful new owner to take forward for their own family enjoyment, and to guarantee its survival. It is a microcosm of pure Cork, preserved.
