Youghal ready for a nice seachange?

Youghal, Cork €550,000

Sq m 260 (2,800 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 4

Bathrooms: 3

BER: Exempt

Best Feature: Seaside bliss

Hayfield Manor meets the Hamptons, in Youghal by the sea - only with utterly individual touches, and huge respect for old buildings, at this captivating Claycastle home.

Facing the miles of beach and promenade, and sea and Capel Island at the East Cork’s historic seaside town Youghal, is this 1860s hospitable family home, sensitively extended a number of years ago and integrating architectural salvage from the elegant old Hayfield house in Cork city, which was demolished to allow for extension to what’s now the five-star Hayfield Manor Hotel near UCC.

Saved, and given purposeful new life, were old Hayfield’s limestone sills, graceful sash windows, old slate, and six cast iron roof lights, sort of the Veluxes of their day, and regrouped here over this Youghal home’s rear dining/entertaining room, centre of many parties, late dinners and dance sessions.

If its walls could talk, whisper it, they’d gossip on a par with websites like Gawker, Perez Hilton, TMZ and more - with a local flavour and salty sea seasoning.

It’s new to market, and a rare mix of property, says estate agent Miah McCarthy of Midleton’s McCarthy and McGrath. Set right on the plum Youghal address of the Front Strand, it takes in the full panoply of wide ocean and long beach views.

Fancy a dip? It’s on hand across the road, so just bring a towel, or robe, or just togs, or surfboard.

This is the first house encountered on this favoured road along the strand, up from Youghal’s leisure centre and its 25m indoor pool, slide and all-weather amenities, and this Claycastle locale offer is high and dry well above sea level, so you can look - but not be touched - by the waves, and that’s important as Youghal’s 2014 storm-battered boardwalk is only now being reinstated.

Homes here were built, day one, in the Victorian era for British military officers and their families, as summer homes, but in recent decades they’ve all been full-time family homes, and that’s the buying demographic now being targeted in this sale.

Guide price is €550,000 for this comfortably accommodating and sea-and south-facing home, now expanded to 2,800 sq ft gratis of its large single-story rear extension, and to its additional side sun room off the kitchen, a room well able to serve up suppers for dozens of callers and guests.

Its owner, who’s been committed to its period roots, has decades in uppermost echelons of East Cork’s food and hospitality sector: that’s abundantly evident in the kitchen here, with heart and hearth-warming green Aga, immense island with thick polished limestone top, and in the individual polished and Brasso-ed copper splashback walls and hanging rails, custom fashioned in thick copper piping and carved timbers.

It’s sort of a calling card for the house, really; respect for craftsmanship and materials and creativity and art, all with a patina of age and gentle wear and care. Walls are kept or matched in old plaster, windows are painted timber sash, some with cords and all have working shutters (the double glazing of the day), adding to the sense of security and protection from the elements.

Paints are from the Farrow and Ball range, from the moccha brown front door and polished letterbox brass in.

Built in local Youghal brick, and with some old stone gargoyles softening their carved features over time, this is a multi-level home, with two fine formal rooms left and right of the hall, each with hearty fireplaces. The gable side room has a double aspect, big bay with window seat, and an oversized open fireplace for logs, salvaged from an even older and grander house and reinstated here.

Entertaining is as easily done up here, in comfortable sofas and widow seating by the fires, or down below which is the feeding and dancing and music engine of this lively home. The kitchen would feed the town, off it is a low-ceilinged pantry/store, capacious enough to sit out a short famine, and across the lower hall is a posh scullery/utility.

There’s been a bit of room reordering - you won’t be caught for space, or character, or visual on any level - down here. The very making now of this Victorian home for contemporary living and parties is the 30’ by 16’ rear add-on, with its pitched ceilings and six skylights, big stove, and polished concrete/terrazzo floor, integrating pea gravel and shell before being ground down to a sheen.

Overhead are four bedrooms, one with en suite, ranged over three levels in a whimsical yet original layout, along with a large main bathroom with jetted, bubbling bath.

There’s a view from every room, either of the beach or sea, or of the protected rear garden, where an entrance has been created in a high wall of salvaged bricks, with a swathe of limestone-paved terrace, patio and huge terracotta planters, ready for summer herbs and colour.

Agent Miah McGrath reckons there’s going to be huge appeal to Sterling-enabled buyers in the UK looking for an Irish coastal home, as well as to returning Youghal natives - and those just seeking a period home of utmost character.

VERDICT: Perfect year-round beach house for families, or building purists, with rare architectural integrity and on-going arty interventions.