Impressive West Ridge stands out from the crowd

With an open plan design and four-person hot tub, this quirky Kerry home also has an excellent guide price, Tommy Barker reports.

BY their handiwork you shall know them...but, many of the crew who did this one-off Kerry home are gone from business, no longer working locally, or have emigrated.

According to this house’s owner (now no longer living locally either) the dispersed crew behind the house called West Ridge includes the builder, the architect, the electrician, the tile shop, the hot tub shop, the two principal furniture shops, the lighting shop, and even the local agent for the German kitchen company.

It’s a shocking enough pen-picture of the national flight of skill, energy, talent and ability due to the economic downturn: after all, this dream house was only completed in 2006 after a painstaking, year-long build period. Not everyone involved in it is gone, fortunately, and the list of some trades and suppliers still going strong is listed at the end of this property profile.

(The good news from our Cover Story features here over the past nine months since Property and Interiors’ re-design is that accomplished houses featured in these pages results in work going the way of some of those identified and credited.)

What’s also salutary is that — as West Ridge, near Muckross in Killarney gets enthralled 2012 viewings — its guide price for sale is €375,000, well within the grasp of a range of house-hunters who know you won’t get to build to this level of finish for this sort of money right now, even with wage rates on the floor.

West Ridge is a 2,300 sq ft one-off on a half acre site, equating to a €160 per sq ft cost, not factoring in any site value at all.

Since it went up for sale with local agents Property Partners Gallivan and Sherry FitzGerald Coghlan, it has impressed, but also puzzled somewhat: it’s different.

Its stand-out feature is its very open plan format, open across much of the ground floor level, and also open up to the rafters, with the main, and very dramatic, indulgent master bedroom open to the floors below it, just separated by low walls.

So, as it stands, not exactly your typical family home — and the large (four-person) hot tub upstairs in centre, pride-of-place position in the master bedroom only adds to the sense of this being designed for a single person or a couple, or the former with a view towards the latter.

That’s not to say that it can’t be altered: a bit of glass screening could restore some more essential privacy to the upstairs quarters, while still keeping the essence of what’s different and what works here.

Or, it could just prove to be tailor-made for an individual buyer — and it would certainly rent out to those in search of a romantic hideaway, amid some spectacular Kerry scenery.

Location of West Ridge is about a mile or two up into the hills at Gortagullane beyond Mangerton Cross, so there’s plenty of bracing hill walks as well, almost literally on the doorstep, while Killarney is a 10 minute spin away.

According to the owner, the design was an amalgam “both my and architect Annette Kissane’s ideas rolled into one, I knew what I wanted idea/style-wise, and she was able to make that work on paper.”

He says that the open plan layout “allows the house to flow from one area to the next, and we used a lot of glass throughout the house to bring it to life, and create a feelgood factor inside all day long.

“Then, at night when the wood-burning stove is lit and the lighting is contrasted and toned down, it is a different house again. They say a well designed house is where every square foot of the house is used every day — and that’s what this house does.”

With all the open-plan space, it would be facetious to suggest there’s a clear saving on doors and architraves. What might have been saved there was re-spent several times over via things like mood lighting, marble and Brazilian hardwood floors, a real high-end kitchen, internal changes of floor levels, plus dramatic, soaring stonework in granite, with granite sills to boot. Externally, there’s Wicklow granite featuring in the gables, porch and in the tall entrance pillars, there’s external sensor lighting, and wiring for electric gates and infra red alarm on the site of almost half an acre.

On paper, it doesn’t seem as if there’s much space, or at least many rooms at all here at West Ridge: essentially it’s a three-bed, with a living room and a kitchen/diner — that’s about the tally in a modest townhouse.

However, that’s far from the reality: It’s bigger, and better when you get past the double-roofed, stepped height sheltering porch faced in its Wicklow granite finery.

There’s a few scene-stealers: One first encountered is the stepped-down 24’ by 20’ sitting room, with double height volume, overlooked from the central gallery master bedroom. It has tall windows on three sides, front and back, as well as on two levels on the lofty gable with PVC mahogany effect French doors for garden access.

The gable is pierced up the centre by a part-rendered/part-granite chimney breast, wicking away the smoke from the efficient solid fuel stove on its raised plinth or hearth, This chimney breast has a deep mantle in a rich-hued timber, and the same richness is seen in the highly polished Brazilian hardwood floor, and in the partially exposed roof joists 14’ above, before the apex, and even more light is drawn in from overhead Veluxes.

While that living space is a set down off the hall, the kitchen/diner at the other end othe hall is up a step — and up the scale too in terms of visual impact.

Wow! Bring sunglasses — this is also bright, with full-on, fire-engine gloss red kitchen units from the Germany company Schmidt. There’s another granite gable fire breast here, a bit of a paradoxical trick really as the heating stove here is electric, yet the cooking hob on the curving central island has a circular extract and venting flue hanging on stainless steel wires going up into the roof. The eye-catching/eye/popping kitchen is 24’ deep, leading into a dining room, and has a pantry off in the middle of the house near to where most of the services/plumbing are centralised.

Thus, the two ground floor bedrooms’ en suites are back to back with a ground floor bathroom next door so that the centre-of-room bath can be accessed from either marble-clad en suite. There’s also a shower/wet-room off the kitchen, next to a utility room.

Huge attention has been paid to lighting, both in placing spots and in LED/atmosphere lights. and low-level blue-ish LEDs surface at step and stair levels in lots of places, while entire colour washes ‘paint’ the walls at night. Trot along up the carpeted stairs, and that’s where West Ridge gets most different. The upper deck bedroom (with access to attic storage and with a home office section too) under the feature sloping ceilings with polished joists is different, most notably for the lack of an en suite at this specification, but thanks most of all to its sheer size, openness, and the lurking, bubbling, gurgling presence of a four-person, cedar-clad hot tub for total immersion.

Now, of course, you don’t need all four persons to enjoy the multi-jet/jet-set hot-tub, it’s mostly a capacity description of the pond-sized feature, Tiger-era bath-time before bedtime.