A substantial period offering that’s easy to manage

FANCY your prospects in Limerick’s Prospect House?

Georgian in style, Victorian in era, and locally grounded, but with roots back to Cromwellian times, Prospect House near Askeaton, and with a Shannon estuary and airport aspect setting, is a seasonal market offering, likely to sell for around a reserve of €500,000 via agent Lisa Kearney of Rooneys.

She calls the west Limerick Prospect House a substantial period offering, but in truth prospective buyers shouldn’t be put off by the word ‘substantial’ — it is a manageable buy, and a relatively easy place to keep up to speed.

Part of its appeal is a sense of scale: it comes on three acres, with a long avenue approach lined with mature trees all the way up from splayed stone entrance walls and wrought iron gates. Much of the grounds are stone-walled.

The house dates from about 1850, and was home to local landlord William Waller, descendant of a Cromwellian settler Sir Hardress Waller, who received extensive west Limerick estates in the mid 1600s.

The grounds, mostly in paddock, include an old orchard with spreading old fruit trees, cobbled yard and old stone out-buildings with part slate and part galvanised roofing, and stables, partly lofted. Renovation and conversion project, anyone?

The house itself is a low, symmetrical two-storey Georgian-style home, with three upper floor bedrooms and a fourth ground floor bedroom.

It has been upgraded in the last decades, with the addition of a sun room and re-done bathrooms, for example; while the look hasn’t been kept truly period, many original features remain, such as marble fireplaces. Several of the rooms have parquet flooring, while the bronzed aluminium sunroom addition (15’ by 11’) has a tiled floor.

There’s around 1,850 sq ft of well-kept internal space in all, and the quality and charm of the stone-walled grounds, and the Shannon estuary setting near Ballysteen church, are also among Prospect House’s best prospects.