Cover story: Rocklodge home was rebuilt to match its gardens

Rocklodge, Cork €975,000

“YOU wouldn’t move a tree, but you’d knock a house.” So quipped the builder of this period-era quality new-build home, on very special grounds created out of sloping woodland and a walled orchard at Upper Rocklodge, over the past 23 years.

Welcome to Carrig Rua, a thoroughly modern residential take on a Georgian house standard, done to the same exacting craftsman standard as in days of yore, on three acres, all of which were laid out with the same sort of future-seeing sensibility as landowners of previous centuries.