Design time-piece a walk-in job with a fresh look
UNSURE what to do with 1960s-designed houses when they come up for sale? The makeover done in the past few years on design time-piece Carrigard should give confidence to those nervous of tinkering with homes from this era.
Like renewing any period era home, it’s been done with respect for its vintage and ethos — but hasn’t been a slave to it, and now the confidently updated home is up for the taking, a walk-in job on its split-level site.
This 2,500 sq ft Kiilcoolishal, Glanmire home with living space upstairs and bedrooms beneath (yep, this often-times sensible layout trick is now 50 years old at least, with far older ‘piano nobile’; antecedents) was built as a family home of the late engineer Philip Mullally, a director of contracting firm Bowen Mullally and who was also chairman of An Taisce for a period as well as a social and environmental campaigner.
Philip and Molly Mullally later built a larger glen-side home for their large family nearby at Kilcoolishal, and this early, innovative home of theirs subsequently changed hands several times, and was last bought in the mid/late 2000s by a professional family who are now relocating. They seem to have done everything to it, at considerable cost.
Today, it has been re-roofed with a Trocal sarnafil membrane, windows are replacement alu-clad Douglas fir, made by Canadian firm Lowen and German firm Produkt, there’s wide oak flooring, a central vacuum, quality bathrooms, pressurised water system, new oil-fired boiler and high-performance rads, and a glossy kitchen by In-House, with Miele appliances, plus a bank of Siemens ovens.
The house, on a sloping acre site with elevated, expansive harbour and Little Island views, is new to market with estate agent Malcolm Tyrrell of Cohalan Downing who enthuses “I love the sheer quality of everything put into this house, no corners were cut.”
An example is the master bedroom’s large Huppe corner shower with body-pummelling water jets: it looks impressive, but the pivoting shower door action is an example of quality engineering at its best, open and shut case.
Garrigard has three of its four bedrooms en suite, and there’s one guest bedroom at the upper/entry level which gives an extra measure of privacy, while all of the best rooms — the lofty-ceilinged kitchen, the living room and the dining room — are upstairs, to the front and flooded with southerly light and views, which include water, hills and a dash of industry and activity at East Gate Business Park far below.
In addition, there’s an extra large rear family/games room, a back kitchen or utility, a parana-pine panelled study/den, and outside area boiler house, a steel garden shed, and a sturdy log-cabin-like man shed, 4 metres by 4 metres, ideal for hobbies, teenagers and drummers: the entire’s on a site of 0.75 of an acre.
Internally, the decor is a modern/contemporary take and twist with a doff of the cap to the ’60s, the slim clerestory windows in the dining room and living room have been kept, and external access has been enhanced with glass and stainless steel balconies off these rooms, with garden access from the lower-ground level’s bedroom three. As the house is split and set back into its site, there’s extremely useful storage and services’ access space to the back.
Carrigard is brightness and airiness personified, with good circulation areas and quality joinery, with new cherrywood doors, oak flooring and a new open-tread stairs with tensioned steel wire guards, and new lighting is a mix of one-offs in glass and some contemporary standards — a lot of shopping foot-slogging was done to keep standards up.
Despite all the work and spending, the 2,500 sq ft house has scored what seems to be a pretty disappointing E1 BER, but looking at the quality of the heating investment, the top-brand windows gone in (one or two at the back are still single glazed) it should be extremely comfortable to live in. Between the roof’s profile, and the site’s slope, Carrigard’s a hard building to get a visual grip on externally, but inside (and with the vista) it’s a class apart at its €545,000 asking price. While the inside’s all spruced up since 2007, the grounds have had some recent tree surgery and need time to recover.
Ahead of its time for its day, and now back in fine fettle for decades more, this home is a mile from the Jack Lynch tunnel, in settled old Kilcoolishal woodland above the N25, a short commute from Cork City and near Glanmire’s services and a handy springboard for all of East Cork’s many amenities.
Glanmire, Cork
€545,000
Sq m 233 (2,500 sq ft)
4
E1
4
Design quality
Massive spending and upgrades done to the next owner’s benefit.
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