A life of luxury on the links

The Heritage has all you’ll ever need — and then some, says Tommy Barker.

IT’S hard to keep up with the neighbours at The Heritage — they include names like golfer Seve Ballesteros, and ex-international footballer Niall Quinn.

However, if you do want a more pedestrian lifestyle than that of such high-achieving sports stars, this Killenard, Co Laois, development can provide that too, as its top-notch championship golf course has a four-mile floodlit walk and jogging track right around its perimeter — thereby negating the old saying that a game of golf is a good walk ruined.

That bracing walk route — much used by locals and by a neighbouring order of nuns at a retreat centre — is one of the innovations in this quite remarkable mixed development, a sort of instant “Heritage”, done by a successful local developer Tom Keane and his son David, who also own the Portlaoise Heritage Hotel in the town.

Sort of slap bang in the middle of the country, just off the main Cork/Limerick to Dublin M7 road and an hour from the capital, The Heritage at Killenard includes more than 80 houses (a mix of permanent homes, holiday houses and rental houses and apartments,) a 98-bed hotel hugely popular for weddings and which opened in 2005, there’s a huge 37,000 sq ft leisure centre and spa with 20 treatment rooms, a Seve Ballesteros and Jeff Howes co-designed championship golf course, a Seve Ballesteros Golf School, a secondary par three course, landscaping with five lakes, lawn bowls, and tennis court, helicopter pad — and some of the biggest one-off houses around.

With a great quality of build, but with rotten market timing, a couple of the biggest houses here at The Heritage came up for sale this year, priced from €2.55 million for a 5,500 sq ft home called Ivy House to €2.8 million for a 7,000 sq ft whopper called the Leix Manor.

Loosely modelled on the James Gandon style of architecture seen in the nearby neo-classical Emo Court, they are pitched very much at the sort of buyers who will weather this current recession, and want a bullet-proof build and top specification house, with a range of family and corporate entertaining amenities, in a super-secure setting. (There’s an inner and outer ring of security with electric gates and 24-hour surveillance security.)

As an indication of the level of finish buyers can expect, the Keanes can show finished houses and penthouses done of a really lavish scale by their build crew, and when you see a PC (provisional costings) allowance of €200,000 for each to allow for personal tastes like floors and fireplaces, you get an idea of the big-budget thinking.

The Leix Manor, for example, has an internal elevator which whisks you from the internal inner hall past the bedrooms level, up to the rooftop terrace, which is large enough to host cocktail parties on as the sun goes down on your on-course golf course, the manmade lakes and the Slieve Bloom mountains in the mid-distance.

For those looking for even more personal input, the Keanes will sell sites of 0.6 of an acre upwards, with outline planning for large two-storey houses and Tom Keane reckons that building costs have now come down by as much as 30% from peak. Serviced sites are priced around €500,000.

Each Heritage house sale comes with two golf club memberships, and unlike other hotel, golf and spa development in Irish country estates, the Heritage and its 300 acres is right on the edge of Killenard village, with a new, contemporary-styled national school building, and full range of community services.