Good enough for Ralph Fiennes...

Tommy Barker uncovers Cois Cuain, a West Cork coastal spot where the actor, and his many talented siblings, learned to run wild.

BUILT day one as a dream home, away from the rat race for the artistic Fiennes family, is Cois Cuain, a West Cork coastal find that does exactly what its name implies — it’s bayside, as well as beautiful and bounteous. And, it’s the spot where actor Ralph Fiennes, and his many talented siblings, learned to run wild, and fish for free.

On the same peninsula where TV’s Graham Norton has a shore-fronting holiday home, Cois Cuain was built in the early 1970s, in hands-on style, by celebrated British photographer Marcus Fiennes, and his wife the writer Jini (Jennifer Lash); they were a couple who ensured that creativity coursed through their brood of children, actors Ralph and Joseph, movie-makers Sophie and Martha, Magnus, a composer, Jacob, a gamekeeper, and a foster son, Michael.) Cameraman, Marcus Fiennes came to Ireland to photograph a house (he went on to work for Country Life), fell in love with West Cork and bought several acres by a shingle beach on Dunmanus Bay and Fernamanagh Lake, and started to build a family home.

He commenced a garden that, 40 years on, is testament to his, and subsequent, skilled 1990s planting and care.

The gardens have been open to the public, and have featured in British and Irish magazines and TV programmes. Though the Fiennes family moved to Kilkenny later in the ’70s, the impact of Kilcrohane seems huge and easy living bohemian, recalling cove and lake adventures, fishing in Gulf- Stream-warmed waters, and even dressing up as animals on a Noah’s Ark float for a local summer event.

Now, after a long, green-fingered subsequent ownership in the care of an Irish family, Cois Cuain is for sale, new to market with joint agents Savills in Cork and Dublin, and with Elaine Spillane of Peninsula Properties in West Cork, with a guide of €460,000 quoted.

The house, is probably a bit on the dated side right now, but setting and grounds (the Sheeps Head walk passes through) are exceptional, as is the proximity to the water, so anyone who buys is hardly going to consider the necessary modernisation a burden.

There’s 1,840 sq ft in all, and five bedrooms, and several large living space, plus a 40’ by 20 sun terrace off the kitchen and living room. There’s even a separate guest apartment.

Cois Cuain’s going to appeal to those into quality, simple lifestyles gardening and boating, and the sale includes a mooring.

There’s direct shore access, and a curving shingle beach, backed up by the freshwater Fernamanagh Lake right behind the beach, handy for sluicing off the salt water.

The joint selling agents bill the spot as a bit of a paradise, and certainly the plants which have thrived here since a second burst of planting in 1991 (when the current family of occupants made a full-time move to Cois Cuain, having previously used it as a second/holiday home) give it the air of somewhere far more exotic than normal Irish shores.

Tender varieties from Mexico, South America, Australasia and South Africa flourish in rocky nooks, facilitated by shelter belts of Olieria macrondontaas.

It includes a seaside path with camellias and fuchsias, seating areas, rockeries, fern garden, stream garden and small waterfall, glasshouse, vegetable beds, and among the many tender and unusual plants are restios, yuccas, watsonias, leptospermum, aloes, agapanthus and kangaroo paw.

For hot-house human inhabitants, the main dwelling has oil central heating and sun room with views, and guests can be ‘hardened off’ in a one-bed apartment.

VERDICT: A star.