There’s no place like Holmacre
THE scent from the lawn’s standard roses hangs heavy on the air, enveloping the veranda and creeping into the good rooms at Holmacre — one of Waterford City’s finest period houses. Dating to the later stages of Victorian architecture, as Edwardian changes were first rung, this city home is set to change hands after almost 50 years in the same family’s ownership.
“Waterford houses as good as this only come along every ten years or so, they generally get passed from generation to generation,” says estate agent Des Purcell as he commences viewings — which are time-consuming given the space inside and out, the quirks, and assessing the changes a new family might bring to it for the next decades of ownership.
He’s had a long friendship with the late owner of Holmacre, the Austrian-born businessman Kurt Kraus, who came to Ireland in 1939. He got the chance to buy Holmacre in the mid to late 1960s, buying it from Waterford Crystal’s then-boss Noel Griffin, and moved in with his Woodstown, Co Waterford-born wife Annette and their five children.
Mr Kraus, who had some very successful refrigeration companies, died earlier this year, aged 97. His family say he appreciated and loved every day living in Holmacre, admiring the gardens and views. His wife Annette (whose 20th anniversary is this weekend) was responsible for creating and crafting the gardens, filling beds with colour — and selecting scent-heady roses.
What a place to grow up! Just a mile from the city centre, Holmacre is a totally private world on 2.3 acres of mature grounds and secret areas, with walled kitchen garden, pear and apple trees, gooseberries and red- white- and flavourful currant bushes. Back in its heyday Mrs Kraus had a polytunnel and cold frames for tender varieties and propagation.
The grounds’ specimen trees include ash, beech and Holm oaks — hence the name Holmacre. It has 250’ frontage to the River Suir, just downriver of the city and off the Dunmore Road at Newtown. The area’s chi-chi, sort of Waterford’s Shrewsbury or Ailesbury Road, notes Des Purcell, adding there’s only a handful of houses here with river frontage, and very few with this acreage.
Look upstream, and you can see yachts berthed at Adelphi Quay and the Waterford Boatyard. Look right next door, and you see a neighbour’s boathouse and a projecting jetty for mooring on this rapidly-flowing tidal stretch of the Suir.
Once down the long and laurel-leafy approach avenue off the main Newtown/Dunmore Road, paths wend their way around the 4,000 sq ft house’s couple of acres, and branches hang low. The place is probably ready for a bit of pruning back in patches, especially to open up views down to the Suir from the veranda. Verandas are sadly under-represented in today’s modern homes, even where there are views to be savoured and roses and flower beds to sniff: not every Irish summer has to be spent behind glass and sun-room shelters, as we’ve fortunately found out this sunny July.
Holmacre covers all options by having a conservatory on its southern side — Victorian in style, and with original floor tiles, though the roof’s a bit shook by now.
Main entry is up five gently curving stone steps to a small portico with pink granite columns and ornate door scroll work, contrasting with polished door brasses. Beyond, there’s a deep hall, with oak parquet flooring now ready for a session with a sander and some varnish to bring back to buffed up beauty.
This well-built house has three formal reception rooms, two of which interconnect via a side door — both have French doors to the veranda and have a double aspect for garden views, as well as a study, kitchen, panty and utility (there’s also a dry basement for storage, but not habitable).
The dining room opens to the conservatory, and has a handy serving hatch back towards the kitchen area, a fairly basic space ready to be opened up and reconfigured for modern family living needs. A neat box of service bells, connected to all of the main rooms, recalls the days when servants occupied these lesser rooms.
Upstairs are six and more bedrooms, three of the best and brightest to the front of the house and again the end ones have a double aspect.
There’s a main bathroom serving five bedrooms, with a modern large shower (one of the few examples of any recent spending here, other than consistent maintenance) en suite, and the rear annexe section has a couple more bedrooms, one described as a study, plus a further basic bathroom with adjoining WC.
Holmacre has just started viewings, and some looking may be considering how best to re-order a few key areas, for modern comforts, Even though it’s a protected structure, there may be scope for imaginative alterations.
No architect is credited with Holmacre’s original accomplished design, which is distinguished by solid craftsmanship and unostentatious architectural detailing, including high coved ceilings and ornate centre roses, with Acanthus leaf plaster corbels in the double-depth hall with feature oak staircase.
Holmacre’s windows are original sash frames, with working shutters in the main, and doors have ornate brass fingerplates, escutcheons and handles, and there’s a plethora of original fireplaces, upstairs, downstairs and in the hall, many have high over-mantels.
Details like hearth tiles are intact in almost all cases, some with decided Art Deco touches, and several bathrooms have original ceramic sinks and plinths — while one of the WCs has a pan proudly bearing the brand name ‘Deluge.’
And, you’d want to be modestly flush with cash to take Holmacre into a new generation of occupation. It carries an €895,000 asking price via Purcell Properties, and needs reordering as well as updating as its wiring and plumbing are fairly advanced in age, and heating is a mix of older style rads and contraptions.
There’s some feature stained glass work too, especially on the stairs return, and the first floor landing is itself room-sized, with 12’ high ceilings adding to the airiness. One of this house’s real scene-setters is a finely-proportioned Waterford Crystal chandelier in the drawing room, set off by a number of matching crystal pendant wall lights or sconces. They date to the tenure of the previous owner, Noel Griffin.
That chandelier will remain in the expansive house, which has even hosted family wedding receptions.
“It’s a big enough house for a large family, but it’s not too large, you’d use all of it,” say two of the Kraus family, siblings Marion and Susan, who recall their parents’ Christmas Day drinks parties, and football in the kitchen garden, cowboys and indians, with bows and arrows made from bamboo shoots, a ready source of ammo found in abundance down by the river bank.
Whoever gets to buy Holmacre will reap what they sow in terms of future enjoyment, and they should plan for decades of contentment, inside and out: back at market peak, it would have sold for as much as €2.5m, Mr Purcell believes. At one stage there was outline planning permission granted for three sites with river frontage, but that’s now lapsed.
The gardens — including a novel tree-ringed round garden with stone base for a sun dial at its centre — will jolt back into rude life with a modicum of fresh planting and with flower beds reinstated from shrubbery. The view from the full-length side veranda to the Suir is begging out to be enhanced — summer house for picnics on the lower lawn, anyone?
In any part of the country, a house as fine and prime for new life as Holmacre would be a find. Throw in river frontage, a top Waterford city location and popular schools like De La Salle and the Quaker Newpark (attended by one Sinead O’Connor in the early 1980s where a teacher encouraged her to make her first demo) a 15 minute walk to the city centre and the same to the 400-bed Regional Hospital and shops at Ardkeen... and, well, it’s a place to call Holm.
VERDICT: Wake up and smell the roses.
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