St Patrick’s Hill home has pana-ramic sights...

St Patrick’s Hill, Cork City €800,000

Sq m 327 (3,500 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 5

Bathrooms: 4

BER: G

Best Feature: City site and setting

Winners of Britain’s Royal Gold Medal for architecture, O’Donnell+Tuomey, have their latest project — at St Angela’s school, Cork — actively on site across the road from the period home called Edmonton, itself a venerable building of its day.

Seeing as how Edmonton too is on a dramatically elevated city site of over half an acre, what hopes for something dramatically contemporary to be built here alongside, to keep up with the scholarly neighbours?

We’re half way up St Patrick’s Hill, just where the hill goes vertiginous, with Cork city centre and Lee river at its feet as an accommodating base camp for any upwardly mobile ambitions.

Just across the hill, the Ursuline order’s 1800s-founded St Angela’s girls post-primary school is getting conservation, new buildings and dramatic multi-level links - courtesy of RIBA Royal Gold Medal winners Sheila O’Donnell and John O’Donnell, all due for completion in early 2016.

These acclaimed architectsalso designed Cork’s Glucksman’s Gallery, with the garlanded 2014 London School of Economics Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, among their many cultural and educational buildings.

As Edmonton comes to market, carrying a €800,000 price hope, estate agent Sam Kingston of Casey and Kingston remarks just how rare it is to find any comparable house and grounds still in private ownership, so close to the city core.

This is an executor sale, and the main semi-detached house is three-storey, 3,500 sq ft, full of period authenticity and features, old fireplaces with copper inserts and with quirky, ornamental fretwork detailing around its staircase.

It dates to 1870, and in the early 1900s it was lived in by a one-time Church of Ireland Bishop and his wife, a doctor.

Indeed up until the 1980s St Patrick’s Hill was home to Cork’s medical fraternity, with surgeries aplenty in the tall, terraced houses lining its lower sections. Since then, the hill and surrounds have become ‘school bound’, home to St Angela’s, CBC, Bruce and Hewitt private colleges, as well as several other centres and language school.

In more recent times, No 7a/Edmonton has been a private home with bedsits above, so has kitchens and bathrooms on each level, with its main rooms facing south, a ‘Pana-rama’ of sorts.

Key to its financial value now, though, is its grounds, at one time they must have been quite special and lush, now they’re overgrown but still with an element of magic.

With over half an acre in sheer area terms, and with a couple of old garages left here too behind high screening walls, there’s clear scope to build, and to do something dramatic, subject to planning approval.

There could be one or two special sites, or a more mews-like series of townhouses perhaps, along the lines of last week’s feature here on Dublin’s One Percy Place, in the heart of Ballsbridge.

“There’s clear potential for development here, so buying interest may come first and foremost from a developer or a builder, who might then sell the house separately,” reckons Sam Kingston, outlining the probable course this executor sale will take.

However, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone (in the trade?) will fall for the house and garden, and get back much of the eventual purchase price once they’ve got planning on something they’d be happy to live alongside.

The main, residence has good bay windows at ground and first floor level, and rooms have some ornamental plasterwork on ceilings, but the most unique feature is the glossy painted timber fretwork and ornate carvings — almost eastern in character — in the hall and stairs.

VERDICT: The house is good, the site is even better.