Be cunning, take a look at Foxwood, a rare city site

A RARE city site is on market in Cork, at an affordable price.

Foxwood, St Luke’s Cross, was on and off the market through the 2000s, at one time rising up in price to more than €2.5 million, for a 4,000 sq ft house on a wooded almost two-acre site, plus orchard.

The 1960s-style Rohfab house with swimming pool was always a candidate to be knocked. Viewers didn’t warm to its ’60s character, and the site and development possibilities were always the key element. It eventually found a buyer, at an undisclosed yet substantial lower price level, and the buyer got planning for two large houses.

Keeping the larger site and orchard section at the back for a dramatic, circular one-off family home, he is selling the front site, measuring 0.37 of an acre. It is pretty much wooded all around, so leafy that you’d barely know the city was just down the road.

Michael O’Donovan of Sherry FitzGerald seeks offers around €375,000 for the site, reached via a long, tree-lined avenue.

There’s full planning in place for a 3,175 sq ft house of three levels. Design is by architect Steve McClew, who also did the more dramatic design for the house behind which has had site works just started alongside. Mr McClew says the design for the house/site being offered for sale is flexible in its internal layout, with emphasis on aspect to maximise natural daylight.

It has scope for four big bedrooms at each first floor corner, with the possibility for several more rooms again at the next, top floor level.

With a number of recent sales in the area, Sherry’s Mr O’Donovan knows there’s always demand for quality homes in this St Luke’s Cross area.

But the chance to actually do a full, new house to a buyer’s own detailed specification here is almost a novelty.

Allowing for even as much as €200 per square foot to deliver a high-end home on the site, a buyer could have a pretty fancy place, on an exceptional site — and still have change left out of a million euros.