High-spec Hawthorn Lodge

IT’S called a lodge, but in fairness, this Tipp-top house on the hill, Hawthorn Lodge, is a bit too grand for its modest-seeming name.

Set up on three acres on Urra Hill, near Puckane and Dromineer north of Nenagh in Tipperary overlooking Lough Derg, this is a contemporary-styled home that’s ready to move into.

Having enjoyed its setting, its owners (who bought it from two brothers who’d managed to get two rare plannings up here) are heading back to their Wicklow roots, hence its sale with agents Savills, who say it couldn’t be built to this level for the sort of sum it is now being sold for.

Built back around 2005, to a design by London-based A-EM Studio, Hawthorn Lodge is now for sale guiding €765,000 via Savills’ Sam Daunt. For that buyers will get a high-spec, energy efficient 4,750 sq ft home, on three landscaped acres with its rooms and extensive decking areas all oriented for the lake views.

Aspect is south-west, maximising natural light with good ceiling heights and large, often floor-to-ceiling windows.

There’s two basement rooms, one for games/media, three bedrooms with very large master suite with its own triangular, private sitting room off the sleeping space, with high ceiling and motorised window vents.

The facade is indented, stepped in and back out, and assymetrical to break up its long run across the front, with a mix of white render, cedar shingles, pitched slate roof and flat lead and tile roof sections, and there’s a spiral stairs to a viewing balcony over the back two bedrooms. The back of the house is given over to circulation corridors, utilities, pantries, etc, while there are separate main reception rooms to the front.

The kitchen steps down to the end dining/seating area, there’s another sitting room mid-ships, and the really grand room is 34’ deep, by 20’ wide, a split-level space with drawing room in the lower section, and formal dining room six steps above, separate by cherrywood library bookcase and cupboards. This twin room has high, pitched and sharply sloping ceilings, and two matching contemporary chandeliers.

Features include solid oak joinery and floors, underfloor heating, wood pellet boiler, argon filled double glazed windows, solar panels and high insulation levels. There’s a mobile phone-monitored wi-fi alarm, satellite TV, and a pressurised water system, with its own well.

Outside, there’s a sheltered courtyard and a convertible garage built to residential standards, fruit and veg section, two acres of fenced paddock with landscaping closer to the house, and three-quarters of the outside is fringed in decking, with exterior lighting. Hawthorn Lodge has right of way access to the edge of Lough Derg.