Cut! Action! The missing zero in a film-maker’s home sparks interest

YES, it was a website misprint: prices might be slashed all over the shop, but 9 Toureen Terrace — the family home of an acclaimed BBC documentary film-maker, the late Philip Donnellan — was never going to sell for e49,000.

A zero inadvertently got left off the Savills website listings for this Cork harbour period home, making it — very briefly — the cheapest house for sale in the country.

Blink and, oh, sorry you’ve missed it.

With the error spotted, it is now correctly priced at e490,000, down from an earlier e530,000 ask.

The mid-terraced house on Toureen Terrace is in Passage West, Cork harbour, and dates to the 1840s, around the time of a visit to Cork by Queen Victoria to open a dockyard. The double-fronted house, with a lot of sensitive restorations done by its owners over the years, is quite a handsome home, and beyond its back gardens is an old stone workshop (part of a series along a hilly back road behind up to Marmullane), which allows access for cars: mews dreams, anyone?

No 9 has its rooms over three floors, with a first floor drawing room, and it is laid out with a bedroom at each of its three levels.

However, given its first floor options listed as a 17’ by 11’sitting room, with marble fireplace, a study with access to a vaulted, book-lined studio to the back, and on to the elevated rear garden, it clearly is an adaptable sort of space, and the attic level has a room convertible to another bedroom.

Much of its original period character has been kept, and the late Philip Donnellan did a lot of the work himself.

Described in his Guardian newspaper obituary in 1999 as “one of the greatest of all documentarists”, and with Galway family roots, he worked for the BBC for four decades as a socially committed documentary film-maker.

Much of his work concentrated on ordinary lives, though he filmed features on De Gaulle, Adenauer, and Nehru, and he made film versions of ballads with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger.

He featured the lives of Irish migrants to England, occasionally shown by TG4. His Irish films are in Dublin’s National Film Archive.

He is survived by his wife, Jill, who worked for the BBC, and four children