Ideal holiday home

YOU can sense, anticipate, or at the very least hope for warm summer days to come at this Schull, west Cork home — it has a garden feature set up for glorious weather days.

And, if glory days are in short supply, sure the feature in question might at least serve as a functional wind-break.

Looking very much the sort of thing you’d have seen in Grand Designs/Diarmuid Gavin garden makeover programmes on the telly in the past decade, the eye-catching feature is a curved, block-built crescent wall built to about head-height, as a patio framer.

Painted a suitably Mediterranean terracotta colour, and ringing around some decking and sun-lounging space, it’s just to the left hand side of this decade-old but thoroughly modern dormer home. The stone-clad dormer is on an acre of elevated ground at Drinane, a couple of miles out from Schull near Toormore.

Back in 2009, when first put to market, it carried a €595,000 asking price: now, with a change of agent to local auctioneer Martin Swanton it is re-priced at €395,000 for a 2011 sale.

It has four, and possibly five bedrooms, and the well-proportioned and well-boned house has 2,600 sq ft to loll around in — much of it also painted in terracotta hues internally.

Two of the open fireplaces (in the main sitting room and dining room) have been fitted with more efficient solid fuel stoves, the 30’ by 16’ kitchen/breakfast room has a wooden floor, pine units and granite worktops and bay window, and there’s also an office and study. utility, and three bathrooms in all — one othe good master bedroom’s en suite, with Jacuzzi bath (giving sea views) and separate shower.