House of the week: Castlefreke, West Cork €395,000
It’s a carved work in ironwood, brought over from a traditional longhouse on the island of Borneo by this house’s owners when they returned to Ireland from south-est Asia.
From this traditional Irish stone porch with scary-looking Asian carved door, you can hear the sea, smell it and glimpse it at Cois Trá, an extended and upgraded traditional West Cork farmhouse and homestead, with modern lofted stone barn, all on two private acres with paddock, by the sentinel Galley Head lighthouse (now depicted in poster form by artist Roger O’Reilly, see www.irelandposters.ie) and pounding surf beaches.
Listed this autumn at Donour West with agent Andy Donoghue of Hodnett Forde, this is a modern take on coastal farmhouse living, where it’s all about location.
Just over a slow, rising crown of hill to its western boundary is Long Strand, a mile-long glorious beach with dunes and trails, hugely popular with surfers and dog walkers: it’s as elemental a spot as you could wish for on the Wild Atlantic Way, ‘though it’s not the safest for bathers given the rip currents which surfers love.
Also close to Cois Trá is the super-safe Red Strand beach for kids, while only a few hundred metres from this property’s long approach drive is the rocky cove at Donour, almost in the embrace of the indented coastline west of the Galley Head lighthouse (a popular sport for whale-watching from) heading towards Long Strand.
Location is about six miles from Clonakilty, a mile or so from the uber-pretty village of Rathbarry and Castlefreke Woods, and even closer is the Donovan family’s Fisher’s Cross bar, a real community and sporting hub: the spotless bar’s also a sort of spiritual home for the area’s road bowlers who pass this way most weekends.
Within a short bowl loft of the road/course, Cois Trá is guided at €395,000, reflecting the fact there’s both a quality home and land in a top location on offer, and it’s quite the lifestyle catch, with options to have a home business, workshop or offices in the c 1,000 sq ft stone-faced barn building with high, roller shutter access door, built to house standard and easily converted to guest use, subject to planning.
(The €395k price tag is a tad above recent local sales, while most expensive offer locally is a dramatic, cliff-topping and top-spec house Caisleanui, on six acres, visible on the website of Engel and Volkers, at a steep €1.8m.
That’s for a modernised ‘ranch’, of some 4,000 sq ft with six bedrooms, owned by the Henry family who own Dublin gyms, and where a family member Carl Henry was a familiar, lithe figure on RTÉ’s Operation Transformation.)
At Cois Trá, its owners added to the original two-story farm house, going out to the back in an L-shape so there’s about 2,000 sq ft, with four first floor bedrooms, in a very practical floor plan, plus they put in foundations for a 300 sq ft conservatory.
There’s a large kitchen/dining/living room, 28’ wide and 13’ deep, and overhead are two bedrooms, plus bathroom.
Then, the new ‘wing’ is linked by a glazed corridor section and stairwell, and this more modern build (done c.1997) has a sitting room, utility, WC and office at ground level, with two further bedrooms overhead, one quite large at 20’ by almost 10’ wide, with adjoining bathroom.
HF agent Andy Donoghue says the finished product is “most unique and bespoke, extended into a fabulous family home.”
There’s sea views from the land and the house, over intervening fields, and most of this property’s c two acres is in one large paddock to the left of the long private drive which splits, left to the house, right to the ‘barn’. Behind, trees have been kept for shelter from winds from the west.
Because of the age of the original dwelling, and open fire, there’s an E2 BER, but that quite belies the comforts in the more modern half, and there’s oil central heating, plus a Stanley range in the kitchen.
Quite special setting.
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