House of the week

If this high-end, West Cork house looks familiar, it’s because it graced these pages a year ago as a stand-out example of quality contemporary architecture (delivered by Germans) in part of the south’s most wonderful landscape.

Now that it has come up for sale in summer 2012, guiding €2m, it’s worth revaluation. Still gorgeous, covetable, exemplary. Now, for the couple of mill...

As one of West Cork’s best-finished homes, on a decent 39 acres of wildlife-friendly grounds planted up with 3,500 trees, and graced by new lakes and ancient headlands and Toe Head, this coastal home is eye-catching yet low-key, and is getting most viewing attention so far from the UK, say joint selling agents Charles P McCarthy in nearby Skibbereen, and Savills in Cork City.The air at this sort of price level is fairly thin in Ireland and Cork right now, irrespective of how much it cost to build and finish to this standard and specification.

A UK buyer recently had a €2m offer on a valuable contemporary Kinsale home scorned, while Charles McCarthy landed a buyer just short of €4m for Seamark, a magnificent seaside Georgian home in glorious Glandore. So, the country might be on its knees, but there’s buying interest from beyond our shores for quality stuff, coastal especially.

Enter the €2m Glasheenaulin (translation, ‘beautiful field’), built in the mid-2000s by a couple with both Irish and UK roots, after they bought a 140 acre farm, farmhouse and buildings two miles from timepiece village Castletownshend. They replaced the original with what you see here, a very crisp take on the Irish vernacular cluster buildings, now much admired by locals, passers-by, planners, architects, and magazines: it has rightfully graced the pages of glossies such as Build Your Own House and Home.

It was designed by architects Peters und Wormuth, based in Berlin, and built by a German workcrew as back in 2005 most Irish designers and builders were flat-out, and the couple here were told to wait a few years for a build. As it turns out, the German crew went wallop, so the guest studio was built by Skib man Noel Kearney, to a comparable standard. Since last year, 100 acres has been sold to a local farmer, and what’s here is a quite remarkable trio, made up of two-bed main residence, with two-bed guest cottage, and a studio/gym.

There’s 5,000 sq ft in all, with the main dwelling mostly open plan, stepped internally and pierced by a glazed walkway, and with views from all the key rooms. It’s got bedrooms fore and aft, an option for a ground floor bedroom in lieu of the current TV room, and the main living/library and dining areas are huge, and airy. The kitchen is glossy and subtle, from Poggenpohl, in calm white and black tops, livened up by red glass splashbacks. Aga and Siematic feature among the appliances.

The position on site is pitch perfect, with a south-west aspect and massive sweep of terrace beyond large, sliding doors. From here, the land flows towards the coast (but not quite to it) and is terraced, from mown lawn to wildflower meadow, with lakes put in by Macroom’s Kevin Corcoran and Skibbereen’s Ian Wright to promote biodiversity. There’s a practical, sheltered kitchen garden to the back of the walled courtyard.

The couple say they had to buy the land to get the view, and even with two thirds of the land now shorn off, and back to regular farming practices, the view is unimpeded, morning, noon and night. It has Welsh slate roofing, zinc guttering and chutes, high insulation and finish standards, using lightweight blocks, underfloor heating is powered by an air-source pump and there are solar panels for water heating. The main house has a painted external render contrasting with artful dry stone wall sections from local quarries, and one portion provides a flat roof space for one of the balconies by the master bedroom.

VERDICT: Precision in planing and execution, it’s at ease in a sensitive landscape.