Video: Classic and ecclesiastical Moxley House has so much more than meets the eye

Tommy Barker reports on a late-Georgian home which has just come to market on the Cork city’s Blackrock Road.

IT’S SORT of been a traditional Irish thing to put our houses’ brightest faces out to the public road, sort of laying down a marker of worth, wealth, or status.

Well, 3 Ashton Place, or Moxley House, turns its back to the public thoroughfare running by its north-facing tall facade.

When passing by, on a bend on the Blackrock Road between the comprehensively enlarged Ashton Comprehensive School and the green savanna campus of the African Missions, you glimpse and suspect there’s a big house beyond its screening walls, but you have no idea just how good it is.

Within, and behind, this three storey semi-detached late Georgian home is on an entirely different level to what you’d suspect from your cursory glances, and that’s one of the many things its owners liked about it, from the get-go.

In occupation now for several decades, the current inhabitants are set to trade down from this extended five-bedroomed, three-storey home of character, with immense period detailing, huge authenticity, and an ecclesiastical air to much of its timberwork.

The latter touches are no surprise when you learn this muscular, 1830s-built semi-d was for much of its life a rectory, and it then, in the mid to late 1900s, had a series of private owners, of which the current carers have had the most positive impact.

Having bought it 19 years ago, they extended out the back for a long, single storey multi-use kitchen/dining/family space relating to a verdant sun-trap patio garden, in an aesthetically sympathetic manner.

That terrace is home to not just one, but two, very large patio dining sets, and they get much use.

The kitchen is hard-working; a proper chef’s set up, dinner parties are the norm, culinary standards are high, menus have run to 10 courses and the guest-list is longer still.

Groups have started in the front, formal dining room, and spilled out the back on balmy summer evenings and colonised the outdoors.

The record attendance for a meal is 140 guests and, no, that wasn’t for a family wedding, just members of the legal profession and the Munster Circuit continuing a long tradition of fine dining and wining, into the wee hours.

A pergola at the end of this suitably hospitable and productive extension hosts a draping wisteria which has just passed its spring prime, with pendulous racemes dropping to shoulder height, indicative of just how quickly these climbers (we’re talking plants here, not guests) can colonise and make themselves at home when given the appropriate conditions.

Then, the original back wall of this home is host to a long-established Virginia creeper and other ivies, with some rambling roses to the side wall, plus a fatsia and some scented plants, all combining to knit a cloak of green across the south-facing rear for a country home look.

Country home? “We’re a three minute drive from Marks and Spencers, or an easy walk to the city centre,” note Moxley House’s trading-down owners, aware of the unusual juxtaposition of utter garden privacy and size, aspect, and quality build within such a short jaunt of Cork city centre.

Only the fine period homes of the Victoria Road have swifter city access, it would appear, for those affluent buyers keen to tap into Cork’s current and resurgent ‘Blackrock Road’ vogue, bookended now by cafes at the city and village ends and paralleling the River Lee as you head east.

Moxley House comes to market this month with Sheila O’Flynn of Sherry FitzGerald, who guides at €1,295,000 and who’ll only have to get a home-hunter inside the front door and out to the gardens to get them hooked: it’s a home that will earn its eventual sale price by dint of its finishes, space and surprises.

The Sherry FitzGerald agent very recently got €1.65 million for Woodsgift, a superb detached period home on pristine gardens after its owners (also with a legal profession background) built a trading down home for themselves in its grounds, and they also got a nice €500,000 ‘entree’ when they sold a site for one new-build two years ago, as the cachet of a Blackrock Road address attracted in the first tranche of the current “big money” being paid for the best homes.

Around the same time, the Old Rectory, Blackrock, which had once been attached to the St Michael’s Church, Blackrock, fetched €2m, as that year’s top house sale to local buyers and is currently undergoing a major refurbishment.

No 3 Ashton Place/Moxley House has rectory roots too, but not for Blackrock Parish: it accommodated the clergy for St Nicholas Church, a 1850 Gothic Revival limestone church near the South Gate Bridge, which was deconsecrated in the 1990s and became home to the city’s probation services, offering redemption perhaps by different means.

The retired Canon Salter, long associated with famed St Ann’s Shandon, recalls visiting a Canon Darling, then serving in St Nicholas’ Church, when he was in residence in No 3 Ashton Place, many decades ago.

Coincidentally, one of the feature sash windows now in this home, on the stairs return, with exquisite painted border panels, was created by a glass artist whose work also features in the windows at Shandon.

Nor is that the only Shandon Steeple link, but this next one is coincidental. A subsequent owner of No 3 Ashton Place was a one-time fish, fowl and game seller, on the city’s Oliver Plunkett Street, know coloquially as ‘Fishey Williams,’ and whose game was hung as a ‘catch of the day’ from his shop’s awnings.

Knowing the link, today’s owners had a weather vane made up depicting a fish for the corner, apex-roofed slate turret attached to this home, as one of its more unusual exterior finishes.

There was at least one other owner between ‘Fishey Williams’ and today’s inhabitants, who bought from interim Continental Europeans who had it a few years.

At the time of purchase, it needed lots of attention, but had kept its original features.

Among the most notable are the heavy, ornately carved timbers in the inner and outer hall, very church-like or ecclesiastical in appearance and heft, and possibly a later, Victorian enhancement, and the pace then is picked up by the gleaming encaustic tiled floors throughout the hall towards the rear of the house, and its latter-day 1990’s kitchen extension.

Left of the hall is a butler’s pantry, well-set as a wet bar for the adjacent formal dining room, which has two tall sash windows facing the Blackrock Road and off-street, screened parking for several cars.

The windows sashes work and the shutters work, and there’s an open grey, marble fireplace for cosy dining.

As so much of the day-to-day family life goes on at the back, south-facing section, the owners are wont to close up the shutters across the front facade, for privacy and security, and even the heavy brass door-knocker and door furniture trim on the stout, hardwood door are rarely polished so as not to cry out its wares and internal finery.

Main ground reception rooms are interlinked, front and back, each with fireplaces and the rear room has a bay window with French doors to the terrace and patio dining, and back toward the more modern kitchen extension.

On sunnier days, with doors flung open, and sun umbrellas up around the large outdoor tables, it’s got quite the Mediterranean al fresco vibe, needing little more than coloured lights amid the ivies for a fiesta (if slightly naff) atmosphere.

Also opening to the paved terrace via French doors is a long kitchen extension, with a very large granite topped island which is home to a wide gas hob, a big, integrated steel griddle or teppanyaki grill, and the overhead extract is suitable enormous and all encompassing for peak frying times.

Then, separately against a back wall is a wide, Rangmaster cooker with its own extract, and further off built into a tall kitchen unit is a Gaggenau oven large enough to cook a turkey or two, a swan or an ostrich (no bird is safe from these legal beaks.)

Almost hidden away under the island counters is a purposeful microwave oven, and, allied to the stuffed, bespoke bookshelves by the family den holding hundreds of cookbooks, you’re under no illusion but that you are in a serious cook’s space.

This deep room is extended almost 40’ out from the main house into the gardens, and connects back into the main structure via a back hall, with guest WC with — novelty alert — chess pieces laid out on a tiled grid on the floor for a visual treat and pun, though it’s not revealed whether the set pieces get much in-situ traction from opponents. Best to work out moves alone?

Overhead, the first floor is home to two very comfortable bedrooms, with en suites and the master bedroom’s to the front, with shuttered sash windows, and there are plantation-style shutters to the windows in the private bathroom, set into the tower-like corner section, with a corresponding shower room directly overhead on the second floor.

Apart from its two en suite bedrooms, the middle floor also houses a private study/library (or bedroom six) toward the rear, with garden views as a distraction from the mounds of work files all around, and overlooked by walls of bookshelving, tomes and texts, and more leisured reading options also. It’s a gorgeous, relaxing retreat.

Up another floor there are three further bedrooms served by a shower room and up here too under sloping ceilings (saving on dragging the washing out to a clothes line) is a very practical laundry room, with tanked floor, large appliances and commercial grade ironing/pressing device for bed linen, indicating that here, even the laundry is upwardly mobile.

The upper-set laundry leaves the entire garden behind unlined or unsullied by even a whirl-line, saved for pleasure and planting and on a visit and ramble, there’s a lot of space to enjoy back here.

The entire site stretches to c 0.25 of an acre and is long and lush, with, as a bonus, a secret or hidden garden at a dog-leg to the side, running along the back boundary of the adjacent semi-d to the east. (The pair of similar-sized semis to the west has been unlived in for several years): it’s a perfect space for horticulture, a den, garden room, glass house or a Shomera.

VERDICT: Much, much more than meets the eye from the front, It’s quite a private, period home paradise, an inner suburban stroll from the city centre.

Blackrock Road, Cork City

€1,295,000

Size: 334 sq m (3,600 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 5

Bathrooms: 4

BER: D2

Best Feature: Utter surprise within and behind