House of the Week

Our pick of this week’s property offerings

THIEF! Thief outside! shouted an elderly relative when she retired for the night to an upstairs bedroom at this Kinsale home. But, what she thought was a burglar wielding a torch outside her windows was none other than the reassuring sweep and beam of light of the Old Head of Kinsale lighthouse, off in the distance. Relief, all around.

It’s a story recalled now that the owners of this one-off, top quality Kinsale area home comes up for sale for its international owners, as they prepare to downsize to a brand new, smaller home just a little bit lower on this elevated perch at Clonleigh, near Summercove.

The couple — he’s Dutch, she’s Swedish — who built this 3,750 sq ft home back in 1990 fell in love with Ireland’s southern coastline, and moved here from a period spent in Crosshaven, and years living in places like Libya, Syria, Indonesia. It’s a life dictated by spells spent on oil rigs and drills — a globe-trotting career that actually started on a rig off the Kinsale field, many decades ago.

They designed this house themselves, getting a lot of the features of Irish vernacular style successfully into a large dormer cluster, integrating features like raised gable barges, slate-hung walls (very Kinsale), some stone, and a sheltered courtyard setting linking the house to a car port, garage, wood shed and granny flat. And, it’s all pristine, bright, well-conceived and cared for.

Now, it’s for sale.

Estate agent Catherine McAuliffe of Savills has just listed what she bills as a ‘high-spec home,’ on 1.12 acres on a high setting between Charles Fort and Summercove, and the Carlton Hotel, and that setting gives it a range of views. There’s countryside all around, the harbour and coves below by the boatyard, back to the town of Kinsale and up the bends in the Bandon River, and over to the south west, to the promontory by Garrylucas and on to the Old Head of Kinsale. Over and beyond that again, ships heading across the Atlantic can be seen and, possibly, gas-rigs in the Kinsale field.

Having hailed from Northern Europe and Scandinavia, and having lived in hot climates of 30-40 degrees C, the couple made comfort, and light, lots of it, the main priority here, and they got it.

Downstairs, there’s a small number of big rooms, most with a double aspect at least, and even the central hall and the first floor landing are big, wide spaces — no pokiness here. One of the smaller ground floor rooms is the 17’ by 12’ sunroom, a sun-soaker in the spring and autumn shoulder seasons, enthuse the rightly house-proud owners.

Quite surprisingly for a house coming up on 25 years old, it’s got a great B3 BER rating to bear out that tangible comfort factor. That’s down to things like solar panels for water heating (there’s a toasty hot-press with hot water tank as a result) plus new condenser boiler, good insulation with the extra-wide ‘block on flat’ walls, along with good double glazing. Other heating is oil-fired, there’s an oil-fired dark green Aga in the kitchen, in a brick hearth surround, with oak units and Bosch appliances, and oak features again as red oak flooring in the main 28’ by 19’ and 26’ by 17’ reception rooms. Each of those rooms has a feature fireplace, with a Belgian Flam stove now inserted into a cast iron surround for extra heat efficiency.

Upstairs, every one of the four bedrooms has a double aspect and mixum gatherum views.

Apart from the main house, there’s a just-built two-storey 700 sq ft, one/two-bed guest studio, which can be linked on either level to the garage.

VERDICT: Smart design, smartly kept, and great space near Kinsale.