Butlerstown House is a Georgian prize

There’s a lotto like about Butlerstown House, says Tommy Barker.

BACK in the late 1990s, these property pages ran a weekly “Lotto House” slot — showing the sort of house you could aspire to if you won £1 million or so in a Jackpot coup.

Rising house prices made the column a bit redundant, suddenly £1m wasn’t enough to get you into a great house, and a good financial comfort zone too. Through the Celtic Tiger years, you really needed a major Lotto rollover (or Euromillions win) of multiples of millions to even think of making a trading-up move to something a bit classy.

But, with falling values, the days of an average jackpot win prompting thoughts of a personal country pile are rolling around once more. With a bit of luck, a jackpot of €1m or€2m or so, and something to trade-in, a man or woman can dream again. Get that ticket.

Step up Butlerstown House, a west Cork real deal with a €1.5m AMV via its joint agents Catherine McAuliffe of Savills, and Martin Kelleher of SWS Property Services. While the rest of their auctioneering fraternity and sorority might be languishing in a summer doldrums market, they at least will have a slice of paradise to while away viewing times in. And, the prospect of a real, live, well-priced seller on their hands as well.

The Georgian house is on up to 10 acres of land in gentle coastal countryside around Barryroe and Seven Heads, an easy strike (but you might get lost on the leafy lanes this verdant summer) from Bandon, Clonakilty, Courtmacsherry, and just an hour from Cork city, airport and ferries.

The setting is exquisitely pastoral, as well as beach-served coastal, and there’s not so much land that you’d need to be farmer to get stuck into it all. But, it does include paddocks, lawns, mature woodland (more than enough wood each year to harvest to heat a big house,) courtyard, immaculate stone outbuildings and stores a 1.25 acre walled in garden with 11’ high walls, productive polytunnel, orchard, and rich wildflower meadow, with paths cut through by lawnmower.

However, all the growth is so well established, the grounds and gardens are easy to keep. “We wake them up in April, and put them back to sleep in November,” says one of the owners. Does he not know that most envious visitors want to immerse themselves in an outdoors as beautiful as this?

The period Georgian house itself (with its original side/rear annexe) .competes well for attention, too though, with about 7,000 sq ft of residential pace in all, with five principal bedrooms, most with en suites or assigned bathrooms, and an owners’/staff suite as well at one end, all in mint order.

There are two formal reception rooms (one has a Victorian set of double doors to the croquet/tennis lawn) and several secondary rooms plus a games rooms, an atmosphere-charged historic-feel kitchen with Aga and stone flagged floor, and a hall with split or bifurcated staircase and room-sized central landing (one Japanese guest observed that his Tokyo apartment was smaller than his private en suite bathroom at Butlerstown.

The vendors have run Butlerstown House as a profitable guesthouse and then as a self-catering option where large families or groups take the whole house, for periods from three nights upwards at a time.

Despite this use, though, it feels entirely like a private home, with personally and perfectly chosen antiques and decoration throughout.

The whole place is in quite perfect-seeming order, no hints of hidden horrors you sometimes suspect in houses of Butlerstown’s vintage, which is c. 200 years old, and originally built for the Travers family whose various merchanting and farming members owned swathes of land between here and Timoleague/Courtmacsherry in the 1800s.

The house has immaculately-presented period features, from fine and decorative cornice work to the gilded eagle (said to be a Travers’ family motif) on top of the elegant arched Georgian window.

The joint selling agents say Butlerstown House “is in superb decorative order with all the original features and has been meticulously maintained by the present owners,” and they expect the viewing interest to come from the two strands of either owner-occupation, or as possible guest business venture: for anyone with some experience in the sector, it is going to be a very tempting trading-up option.

Lotto, lotto, lotto temptation.