Open the Gates on a special site and special home
Bandon, Cork
€675,000
Sq m 280 (3,045 sq ft)
3/4
B1
Perfect fit/special site
Good architecture and house design responds to its siting — but, truth be told, very many sites make little demands on house designers: Bandon’s Laurel Gates, however, is different.
It’s a special site, and special setting, and the home built here has made the most of all of its positive attributes. It’s south facing, with sunny views down through dappled light of old, retained trees and down along now-terraced and tiered gardens, to the River Bandon beneath.
The contemporary-styled, eco-aware and energy efficient build sprung up on a rare half-acre woodland site half a mile from Bandon town centre, at leafy Laurel Walk near the highly-rated Hamilton High School and Allen Square. It’s reckoned to be one of the nicest place to live in and around this West Cork town. And, given that it’s only a 30 minute commute to Cork city, new owners for Laurel Gates could come from well beyond Bandon’s regular catchment - the house is special enough to justify a lifestyle move to.
Designed by Bandon engineer Ross Coakley, who’s done a fair few ambitious one-offs, it was built by and for a local couple, living close-by who were seeking to trade down, and they knew well the charms of Laurel Walk. During the design process, it sort of grew in size and attraction, and amenity, and they put huge thought and effort into its every feature and garden detail, making sure old cherished items of furniture, art and decor got a new home in a modern, gallery-like setting. Now they’re ready to trade all over again to something smaller.
Laurel Gates is fresh to market with joint agents, Bandon-based Mark Kelly of Property On-line, and with Malcolm Tyrrell of Cohalan Downing in Cork City who guide the exceptional, cheap-to-run one-off thanks to its eco-features at €675,000. Total energy bills a year for heating, water and power average around €1,500, thanks mainly to a well-designed geo-thermal heat source along the river.
“I’d reckon it’s one of the very best houses in Bandon,” Mark Kelly ventures, justifying his assertion with the points that the address is tops, the specific location on the Laurel Walk is superb, the aspect is pitch-perfect complete with river boundary, and the house build and design is more than a match for it, with top-quality features and finishes throughout.
It’s a two-storey/split-level build, on a sloping site, with a modest facade to its approach, where there’s a gently curving single storey aspect to the avenue and old-retained stone pillars and gates of the stately Coolfadda House further up Laurel Walk’s avenue. The house’s curve facilitates easy driving and parking around an enormous beech tree which serves to pin-point this newly-arrived house, set a short distance from the commanding beech., It has got surprises galore lurking beyond that arc and feature entrance which, again, picks up that curving, crescent shape in its extra wide, bespoke-design main door.
Laurel Gates has two-thirds of its living space on this upper tier, stretching back to the glories of a full two-storey height and even more softly-muted cedar cladding to the south, plus well-placed glazing for views of river, sky, trees, gardens, and sun terraces: no sooner are you within the curved welcoming hall, but you want to gravitate to a window and gaze out.
This upper level is home to two bedrooms, including the master bedroom with its dressing room, en suite, double aspect glazing and sit-out terrace for morning coffee. Tucked back into the house’s curve to the north is a sumptuous guest bathroom, and light floods into the hall/landing core thanks to a broad feature picture-window due south across the feature stairwell, with four Velux windows directly overhead.
Off the hall, via timber double doors, is the formal drawing room, deliberately kept a bit old-world, with a small chandelier, and a fine white marble chimneypiece, with brick back, set in the middle of a wall with large, deep windows either side looking straight into the shock of trees branching just on the other side, and the river flowing right to left about 20 metres lower down the very long garden.
Generally, it’s the sort of room that you’d expect fancy window dressings and drapes in, but here, there’s no need at all — the view and aspect is dressing enough. And, as an extra, there are French doors out to a sun terrace that connects with three rooms in all, that drawing room, an adjacent family room with raised black stone fireplace, as well as a kitchen/dining room, with feature exposed beams and vaulted ceilings.
Laurel Gates has several stand-out rooms, and the dining room-kitchen connection is definitely one of them, with hefty exposed larch beams, feature lighting, four Veluxes sucking the light in, and a bespoke kitchen with Art Deco touches and detailing in larder presses and cupboards, and top-name brand appliances (Neff, AEG, Fisher and Paykel, etc) to boot, with a superb layout for all manner of dinning and entertaining.
The kitchen’s island unit is curved, with a sinuous raised section in walnut as a sort of screening buttress, so that when the owners are cooking, pots and pans can be kept out of sight by the central sink and loaded into the dishwashers without looking unsightly. It’s a lovely piece of work, done by local kitchen maker Emmet Callan. The kitchen floor is tiled, and heating is geo-thermally sourced, provided underfloor for year-round comfort, while a quality rug softens the feel underfoot by the dining table, watched over by an almost sepia-toned tapestry.
One of the strengths of Laurel Gates is just how accommodating it is for decor and furnishing for a variety of looks, it is as homely for contemporary or classic dark pieces, gilded tables, porcelain, paintings and sundry artworks, some of done by talented members of the owners’ family, and all happily cohabiting for a cohesive look.
There’s direct access from the kitchen/dining section to the sun terrace, with plants such as wisteria already making themselves well established around the perfectly positioned pergola.
If there’s any bit of sun, it’s a further ‘great room’ to go with the internal good areas, replete with sandstone paving, pots and sheltering spots, with leafy bowers below and to the side.
Wide steps lead to a lower terrace, again thoughtfully landscaped to a design by the owners, and down here feature planting includes tree ferns and Chilean flame trees, under the canopy of a graceful ash, copper acer, and eucalyptus, with further maturity borrowed from a neighbour’s old oak. It’s all just magnificent, a perfect foil for the house’s external facade finishes, mostly cedar boards which have been treated with lots of coats of an organic wash to fade, date and preserve it. Other materials include coloured render, natural slate roofs and some quality asphalt flat roof sections too.
Windows are double-glazed, by a German company called Sorpetaler, via a well-regarded Kerry agent, who can supply to passive house standards. Giving more utility to the house’s smaller windows are super quality louvred plantation shutters, sourced from Fastnet Blinds in Carrigaline.
More hand-crafted touches feature in the house’s core, with a custom-made staircase curving down! to the lower ground floor, in wrought iron with a walnut handrail. Down here, there’s a third, en suite guest bedroom, a study or optional fourth bedroom, as well as various store rooms, comms room and in the ‘dead-space’ left behind under the house’s spilt level cut-out, there’s a massive crawl-space/storage, which as a bonus gives access to all service ducts for future home adaptations.
The outside WC by the lower terrace is ideal for answering nature’s call during barbecues, or after gardening.
Laurel Gates is on over a half acre in all, but for all that, not much of it needs much gardening input on an on-going basis, and large sections can be left to their own devices. Right now, the lower lawn has a riverside deck/pontoon, a pond and abundant wildlife, from tadpoles and frogs to otters and swans, and the view is over the Bandon to a field of pasture/flood-plain known as the Bogs (for which, sensibly for all concerned and given Bandon’s recent flood history, plans to build a hotel on were shelved.)
Laurel Gates is serene above the Bandon river, a sort of Sunday’s Well stretch of Bandon in Cork terms, and has so much going for it, it may well persuade a city buyer to relocate the half-hour commute for. In fact, that’s sort of what happened another contemporary house, by coastal Coolmaine done by the same designer as Laurel Gates, which featured in these pages in late 2011 and which was bought for around €500,000 by a city-based IT company executive.
Watch this space, so.
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