Thatch-topped rural hideaway in Conna, Co Cork

With similar winsome references to the 300-year-old cottage it replaced, this millennium-built recreation on two acres in East Cork marries the old with the new with a host of modern features and four en-suite bedrooms, writes Tommy Barker.

Conna, Co Cork €275,000

Sq m: 140 (1,500 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 4

Bathrooms: 5

BER: C3

Best feature: New meets old

A VERY convincing recreation job has been done at Bluebell Cottage: this thatched East Cork home looks hundreds of years old, but, in fact, was built just 15 years ago, in 2000. It replaced an older dwelling, with similar winsome features, which had a 300 year old history.

This most unlikely of Millennium builds, is a four-bed, all en suite hideaway home on two acres with stream and pond, and is just about as pretty as it gets: dust it in snow, and snap it with a robin by the window panes and it’s next year’s Christmas card sorted.

It’s only a few weeks on the market with selling agent Michael A O’Brien over the Cork-Waterford boundary in Tallow, who guides at €275,000, and who reckons it will appeal to full-time house hunters, as well as to those looking for a holiday base in the Blackwater Valley region.

It has been home for the past five years to a couple who’d moved over to Ireland from the UK and started house hunting around Conna five years ago. They’d viewed another home, and passed Bluebell Cottage on the way and said “if it ever came up for sale or rent, I said I’d love to see it,” says one of the vendors.

In the event, they were too late to buy that other property and were told a different house was due to come for sale nearby. “It turned out to be this one, so it seemed like fate. I always liked older style houses, with beams and character; this was my childhood dream, a thatched house by a stream, and in fact it reminded me of my mother in law’s home in the Peak District in England,” she adds.

It’s been a happy and cherished home, and just in case it isn’t already romantic enough, the couple have a daughter who plays the harp, so there’s even sound to go with the perfect-looking picture.

Now, though, the family are keen to move into the village, and reluctantly are selling Bluebell Cottage which surfaced in the week prior to Christmas and which will make an increasingly favourable impression as Spring rolls around.

A stream divides the two acres of gardens, linked by a bridge and with a rope suspended from a tree for Tarzan-like creeper swinging from one side to the other, and the grounds include a paddock, orchard, stone circle and outbuildings, one used as a laundry.

Inside, Bluebell’s a bit of a surprise: it’s not dark, cold or damp, and is bigger than the norm. It’s even got underfloor heating in several of the rooms which have tiled floors, but that’s a sort of hidden bonus. The visual heat treat is a large, rounded cast-iron multi-fuel stove which was, in fact, salvaged from the previous cottage and re-used here; it’s antique, but obviously younger than the original cottage would have been, and would possibly have been a revolutionary upgrade in its day.

The living area, with stove, is at the house’s very core, with an old, kinked oak mantle polished up above the stove’s pride of place and brick hearth, there’s a range-style cooker in the kitchen and half doors to the back of the house.

There’s also a conservatory, a den upstairs, guest WC and four bedrooms, one upstairs and all with their own en suite bathrooms. Two of the en suites have old, claw-foot roll top baths. Windows are timber casement style, all around the ground floor and the sun-room/conservatory also has wood windows, well-sheltered under a deep eaves overhang, and with tiled floor, heated underfoot, and central heating is oil-fired.

The builder/previous owner of Bluebell Cottage is a plumber who has built and/or converted several houses around Conna, say the current occupant, and he managed to integrate items of salvage internally to keep in character with house’s oldest roots, while still allowing for contemporary creature comforts: a C3 BER rating in an Irish thatched home is not to be sneezed at.

There’s as much charm externally as internally (you barely glimpse the TV satellite dish behind the main chimney) and the design is very sympathetic to the immediate surrounds, sort of ‘here’s one that was prepared earlier.’

Location is near Conna, but it’s more rural and river-set, and for those into countryside living and perhaps keeping a few horses (might a horse-drawn caravan be one step too far?) there’s an option to add more land to the two acres, says agent Michael O’Brien.

What there isn’t, though, is anything else quite like this modern Bluebell Cottage take on a country classic. If there was one in the village, the vendors here would be on it like a shot — fate, striking second time round.

VERDICT: You could comb Munster for a rare thatched package like this and not come up with anything as comfy.