House of the week

PEACE comes dripping slow, in a greened-in garden setting like that at Bruaidhenabarra. Watching apple blossoms cascade to the ground over an Easter weekend, while blackbirds sing in the half acre of gardens might inspire one to poetry — or at least rob a few of WB Yeats’ lines to perk up some property description prose for a rather special Cork suburban home.

And, there is indeed something special about this house with the hard-to-spell name: it’s down to the space it occupies in locally-favoured Menloe Gardens, off the city’s Blackrock Road, and the promise it brings with it.

It is for sale with agent Dennis Guerin of Frank V Murphy & Co with a guide price around €750,000.

While he’s been showing it privately already for some weeks, and it is under offer, it’s now publicly on the market (Menloe has one other For Sale board up, for a semi-d, and a few others here have been quietly offered, ever-so discretely off-market) as an executor sale.

Bruaidhenabarra, is on what’s most likely to be Menloe’s largest site and gardens, and the corner-set 1930s detached house built here faces the fantastic central green, with its specimen chestnut trees just in powerful ‘conker’ production mode.

This double-fronted house is towards the front of its grounds, with space aplenty either side, linking to a double garage to the left, and the gardens stretch off at a tangent behind, back to an old stone wall boundary lost in drooping trees and overgrowth.

An old gardener’s cold-frame for tender plants is lost under a spread of Leylandii, for example, but the gardens are just so generous here, you almost don’t notice losing 10’ or 15’ off the site’s perimeter.

The house so gloriously sited here is — be warned — a complete do-er up, to be sure, there’s been little or nothing spent on it in decades, but there’s plenty to work with, and everything seems sound enough for its age.

At or around its €750k guide, plus the now-reduced stamp duty burden and adding in renovation/extension costs, a new family of owners could be looking at a budget just under, or more likely, a bit over, the €1 million mark — and that will be for a finished job, on one of the best sites of all here in Menloe Gardens.

A number of these covetable houses have had clearly expensive make-overs and extensions in the past decade. Now, it’s Bruaidhenabarra’s turn, and a side gable terrace on the side of this home with a low brick wall shows where the sun room could and should go. The real bonus here is the fact the site is just so big, the house could even be doubled in size and still not dominate its grounds.

Right now, it’s a double fronted, detached of about 1,750 sq ft, with five bedrooms, two good sized reception rooms (22’ by 12’ and 18’ by 12’) left and right of the wide oak-floored hall. That dark-wood-panelled hall has an unusual stairs arrangement, with a winder option from the side or straight on, one of the quirks of the era.

Behind, there’s a mix of utility and pantries rooms and an original, basic kitchen, plus guest loo, while overhead the WC is separate to the bathroom. The whole back of the house will need to be re-ordered, but the bonus at least is that buyers can start in with more or less a clear canvas here, using the existing house as a spring-board and template. Done right, it will be a home for a family to enjoy for decades to come.

The site’s the star, the house has good bones and great aspect, and the location’s ace.