House of the week

If you want to live in a boring box of a home, it’s best to give Woodbrook House a skip; it’s a one-off, bursting with individuality, comfortably provisioned with creature comforts and five en suite bedrooms, architect-designed and all ageing gracefully and on sloping grounds of dense planting, with pergola, pond and privacy.

Built back in the pre-boom era on 1995, its owners had built once before (a bungalow) and wanted to make a bit more of a statement second time around and to have an adaptable house for a growing family. Woodbrook very much fulfilled its brief, but now with children grown and profitably employed elsewhere, and retirement secured, it’s just too big for its owning couple, hence this down-sizing sale via Robert O’Keeffe of Irish and European.

The 3,000 sq ft multi-level home is a one-off that responded to a steeply sloping site, on Church Hill in Cork’s Glanmire. It looks out over woodland and down toward the plain spire of the local Church of Ireland St Mary’s and All Saints Church, with the tall, brick-finished house set on a relatively small, scooped-out footprint of its 0.75 acre site, with a wide drive sweeping down to a parking and turing area once past electrically controlled access gates bearing its name and 1995 origins.