Historic home tempting

Drumcora dates back to early 1800s. Now its guide price has been cut to €495,000, writes Tommy Barker

THERE’S been some illustrious local professional and business names associated with Drumcora — so, who’ll be next? The distinctive Georgian, slate-hung and double-bow-fronted house on Cork city’s Blackrock Road most recently served as the sports and social club of the Dunlop rubber company, but it its earliest days it was lived in by the noted architect Sir Thomas Deane. Deane had bought it in 1823 from the estate of a bankrupt, for £5,000, and he called it Herculaneum.

It went through several changes of name, and family ownerships, owned by a Captain Sherlock, who sold it to the Mahony family of Blarney textiles fame, and it ended the 1800s owned by wine and grocery wholesaler Dominic J Daly.

It later provided charitable accommodation for needy families, and by the 1940s it was associated with the Doyle family of stevedores, and was acquired by Dunlops from the Egan family in the early 1970s for £20,000.

After three years on the market for the social club members, its price has now been reduced from a high hope of €1.5 million to €495,000 with agents Trish Stokes and John Paul Sheehan of Lisney, who feel that this week’s significant price reduction should get a wider net of buying interest.

The property on a quarter acre on the main Blackrock Road is a protected structure, with 6,700 sq ft right now: strip away the low-grade mid-1900s additions, and there’s still 4,800 sq ft over its three levels, with some key retained architectural detailing.

It needs a sense of drive to make it once more something fairly special, so a confident buyer, taking advantage of the huge price drops, should employ a good conservation architect/engineer, and back-up crew, plus a sensitive builder, to reinstate its original grandeur. A good garden designer, and a digger, would also transform the grounds, most of which are now tarmac for car parking.

According to Lisney, “there are few opportunities to acquire such a substantial family home — albeit in need of refurbishment — in one of Cork’s most sought-after locations. Drumcora has it all — internal space, site size, location, aspect and period pedigree. With imagination and a clever team it offers tremendous potential to anyone seeking a private setting, with direct access onto Blackrock Road, behind its ashlar stone and cast iron entrance gateway.”

They add that its protected structure status doesn’t preclude changes nor exclude development or alteration. However, it does require the owner or occupier to consult with the planning authority, either through pre-application discussions, the planning application process, or through a declaration to ensure that elements that make the structure significant are not lost during development.

MEANWHILE, in a broadly similar opportunity, Savills now quote €850,000 for the large, early 1900s property Villa Franca, on a 0.57 acre site on Cork’s main Douglas Road. Used for several decades as professional offices, and by Atkins engineers since the 1970s, it has over 5,500 sq ft of space, over three levels. It is sizeable and solid, west-facing, and its € 850k AMV is half the €1.7m it was floated at in June 2008.

It has access both off the main Douglas Road, and via Ballincurrig Park, and has zoning for both commercial and residential uses, but will need to be reconfigured for private domestic use. It has huge privacy and potential and isn’t listed.