A calling card of quality

INTERESTED in contemporary architecture?

A sample board of what the more adventurous home builders and their commissioned architects are up to right now can be glimpsed in the Cuil Cluthair development near Sarsfield’s Court in Cork’s Glanmire.

A sloping site by a quiet back road, just off what was the old Dublin road through Glanmire, is now home to an emerging clutch of €1 to €2 million one-off homes, which planners stipulated had to be built to a modern template and using a mix of materials.

The less than a dozen houses have been inching along through planning and construction for the past three years or so, and the first residents are moving in.

Another year or so and the place will be fully finished out, a real calling card of quality building and generally successful modern design.

It is likely to feature for a while in a flurry of drive-bys by other aspiring home builders keen to grab ideas for their own dream homes.

While all have been labours of love, one is now up for sale in its just-built state, and the vendor is the businessman whose own family home adjoined these sites, and who sold them individually to each of these new residents.

He built No 5 Cuil Clutair for his own use, but decided to stay put in his own family home and to sell what he had built instead.

No 5, with a guide price of €1.15m via Jarlath Boyd of Savills Hamilton Osborne King, is an ‘upside-down’ design, with 3,300 sq ft of internal space, pretty much all of it well specified.

It has three en suite bedrooms at its lower entry level, all fairly posh and with brand name sanitary ware, and the master bedroom is not only en suite, but is also has a big walk-in dressing room/wardrobe and sliding patio doors to the side of the house.

The staircase, with a kinked turn in it, is a crisply designed affair with marble steps, glass baluster and walnut handrail, and rises up via the double height entry hall with landing level windows across the span of first floor exterior balcony.

Glass panel balusters also feature across this full-width balcony, accessible from the front sitting room and also running across the front of the upper level en suite bedroom.

The top floor has almost 2,000 sq ft of space, with a big sitting room, kitchen/dining room behind with utility and rear patio access, there’s a family room also to the back, and a main bathroom with Jacuzzi bath and wall-mounted ware.

High-end features include the quality sanitary ware throughout, underfloor heating (gas fired) central vacuum system, and a full-finished Leicht kitchen with curved units and glazed display presses, granite worktops and marble splashback.

Floor finishes are predominantly tile, neutral shades of cream and beige (the new magnolia?), with some solid cherrywood floors in the reception rooms.

Site size is 0.4 of an acre, and the house is ready to move furniture into, with initial landscaping and planting done in time for summer growth.