Earls Well that ends well

BUYERS, be brave – you’ll be the real winners at Waterfall’s Earls Well development – getting the best new homes, bar none, built in Cork (if not all of Munster) in decades. And, you’re being offered them for a bargain, value for money price.

Assertive statements, to be sure, especially when prices here for these smart, contemporary-designed country houses do indeed start at just over the €1 million level – at what is clearly the worst time ever for the country’s house builders and property market.

But, it’s true, there’s value, and quality of build here the likes of which you won’t have seen in a decade of the property boom. Had these houses been launched a few years ago, prices could well have been up to and over the €2m mark.

Just visit the Waterfall site just west of Cork city – bravely opening for sales and viewings only by appointment – and do the math. You’ll see value for money with these barn-storming Fleming Construction houses, of which just five so far have been built.

(And, if you’ve paid around the €1 million mark for almost any Munster new or second hand home in the past few years, look away now; this won’t be pretty for you.)

These bright, healthy and highly-specified and energy-efficient houses range from 3,000 to 4,000 sq ft, and each large site also has lofted 1,335 sq ft garages, built to house-standards, so in some cases there’s up to and over 5,000 sq ft of exceptional house build quality on offer in Earls Well.

Location is behind Fleming Construction’s Heatherfield development of around 60 straight-forward designed houses of 2,500 sq ft apiece. Heatherfield launched in 2004, at prices around €650,000, and second-hand sales in the height of the boom made around €1.1 million, plus 9% stamp duty. Re-sales now at Heatherfield are back below the €900,000 mark.

That Heatherfield single house design was pretty standard, as builders Flemings had bought the site with the designs already attached to its planning grant: Earls Well is a generation ahead not just of those houses, but just about every other house design and package around.

Estate agent Niall Cahalane of Cahalane Skuse says they’re the best he’s ever seen in Cork, and this is another occasion when you just wouldn’t argue with the footballing legend.

Earls Well will, in time, have 42 houses across 30 acres of land, in a village setting just two miles west of Bishopstown, and standard site sizes are around one-third of an acre with acres of green space. Design is exemplary, very much informed by Cork County Council’s seminal Rural Design Guide, a publication since embraced on a national level.

They are future classics, looking right at home in a rural setting even as one-offs, while the landscaping and cluster layout, with every house having the same south-west aspect, and then with separate stand-alone lofted garages, gives a real feel of vernacular farmhouse and buildings layout.

One of the O’Mahony Pike architects designs even has a curved roof barn (pictured) grafted on to it for the real country living deal.