Abandoned cottages repurposed into scenic and unique West Cork home
An artist’s eye, an early training in architecture, and a sculptor’s hand — as well as abundant homemaking skills — are all evident everywhere about this one-off West Cork home. It’s every bit as individual as its owners, and is now up for sale, ready for a new imprint.
Set out just a few fields away from the freshwater angling Corran Lake, and two miles inland from the coastal village of Leap at a townland called Ballyroe, it’s an accomplished, accommodating, and adaptable homestead, on 1.3 acres, and it asserts itself boldly as a lifestyle retreat, but with comfort factors too.
The home of UK-trained artist Ian McNinch, who’s also worked as an architectural draughtsman, and his wife Deirdre, an ex-banker, it’s where they built a home, and started a West Cork catering, paté and salads business, Roury Foods back in the 1980s, long, long before the now well-established annual A Taste of West Cork festival, each September.
Call them early adapters, for their foretaste of West Cork?
This is where Ian and Deirdre raised their two sons in outdoor, free-spirited tree-climbing bliss, hosted family and visitors, worked their land, enhanced their organic 1.3 acres, planted many, many trees, and produced abundant art works, sculpture and funky furniture along the way. They also kept livestock.
And, now with a ‘doting grandparents’ move to Wexford beckoning, it’s for sale, listed with estate agent Con O’Neill of Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill, with a modest-seeming €395,000 all-in price guide.
Whatever contents they don’t take with them will result in the mother and father of all clearance sales, that’s for sure — the place is simply heaving with Ian’s handiwork, creations, and found objects, many of which take on a new life once found and re-placed by the said Mr McNinch, an artist who takes beach-combing and ditch combing to new heights.
His work has been exhibited diversely, in places as far away as Wexford, and in West Cork, in places like the Aisling Gallery in Ballydehob, and the Blue House Gallery in Schull (see also www.ianmcninch.com) and much of his quirky work has been found in, and washed up from, the seas around West Cork, including portions of the old 40’ Galway Bay hooker, the St Patrick, which foundered in Glandore in 2002.
Driftwood, old fishing buoys, nets and rope, bits of oars, bows and prows all get refashioned into practical/aesthetic new uses, calling on his additional skills in welding and woodwork, and many a piece ends up getting a tap stuck onto it somehow, or somewhere, as a sort of leitmotif or design flourish: included in his ‘go with the flow’ tap theme is a range of lights featuring imaginatively repurposed plumbing.
Also ‘repurposed’ is a selection of old central heating radiators, some used as sides for raised beds in a veg garden, while another long radiator is now used as a footbridge over a section of stream, after Ian dug out a circular water channel to create a ‘Treasure Island’ hideout for the boys to camp out on when they were younger, and the water course is fed by a natural cascade of waterfall and stream flowing past, from Lough Currane which, the couple say, is the source of Roury river.
There are also trees galore, many here before their arrival in 1987, many more planted since, such as a huge eucalyptus, and at various times treehouses sprung up with abandon, some of them three stores high — the exact opposite of over-protective ‘helicopter parenting.’
What the couple bought back in the late 1980s was an old dwelling next to a run of abandoned cottages, with roots in the 19th century, if not even earlier, and they pretty much removed what had been there in a long, linear line by a quiet country lane, and replaced it with what’s seen here now, a collection of comfortable spaces, linked yet independent, perhaps 100’ in length, in all.
It’s about the same length as a terrace of eight houses they knew when living in Dublin, at Northcote Avenue in Dun Laoghaire, they observe with some surprise, while surveying it from the ship’s bridge-like deck with mast and flags and seating, in front of the three-bed side of the long, drawn-out replacement dwelling.
In lesser hands, this could all be a bit twee, but the quirkiness, and skill and eye of an artist raises it to a higher level/deck, and — externally as well as internally — it’s chock-a-block full of clever ideas and adaptations. Personality type? ‘Exuberant’ might just about cover it.
There’s 3,700 sq ft in all, in this house with its two sections, one with scope for up to five bedrooms, the other with three bedrooms and including several studies, studios, and workspaces, as well as link sections, conservatory and more. Even a careful perusal of the floor plans on Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill’s web listing may leave you not fully sure of what goes where... And the larger, five-bed section can be divided into two smaller guest sections simply by covering over connecting bedroom doors upstairs with removable shelving.
Auctioneer Con O’Neill describes it as a mix of modern and traditional architecture, and has had a small first throughput of viewers. He predicts that it’s the sort of lifestyle promise that it holds which will match it to its next owner and occupants, who’ll put their own stamp on it next.
It might take more than a bucket or two of creamy ‘neutral’ paint to depersonalise, yet at the same time Ian McNinch’s own background in architecture seems to have meant creating a building that will endure beyond one family’s individual time in it, built as it is in everlasting stone (the old cottages sacrificed their bones and stones for this ‘new’ arrival), and it has hardwood double glazing, a sunny aspect, and underfloor gas-fired heating in most of the ground level areas, plus stoves.
The abundance of trees on the property means the family have never had to buy in wood for their stoves. The wood is dried out fit for using in double-jig time, thanks to being split and stacked in a ‘solar house,’ a shed made up with leftover plastic from a polytunnel which super-dries the blocks, in just a year or so, instead of the more usual several years.
The ‘hide and reveal’ grounds have organic herb and veg sections, threaded with strimmed pathways and architectural artefacts like old chimneys, found objects, sculpture, flotsam and jetsam, rope, buoys and nets, old glass and ceramic insulators from atop ESB poles, random seating, and mossy, flower-bedecked walls.
Location-wise, it’s just a few miles off the well-beaten track of the N71, just to the north of that road between Connonagh and Leap. And, almost as a metaphor, there are two ways of finding it.
It’s postal Eircode brings you around the side of Lake Corran, on a road so narrow and overgrown with grass up the middle that you think it’s going to peter out in a ditch — and then you find it, complete with ‘For Sale’ sign. After a two-hour Irish Examiner visit and stroll around, the passing traffic by its front ‘ship’ deck amounted to the postman in a van, and a neighbour walking two dogs.
“Some good that For Sale sign will do,” was the thought on leaving the idyll, only to find a far busier road (far busier only by comparison, that is) just 100 yards away, with a clear run down the couple of miles to the centre of Leap, by the Myross inlet up from Union Hall and Glandore, close to where the reborn Connolly’s of Leap bar and music venue will be found, forging its own new legends.
Clon-based agent Con O’Neill says, “Ballyroe is the ideal space in which to get back to nature while writing that book, rehearsing the music, indulging in art or other creativity. The potential for income is also significant at the property, and we recommend a viewing.”
That’s added to by vendors Deirdre and Ian McNinch: “it was the feel of the place that attracted us, and encouraged us to buy it.” And, that’s exactly how it will sell again, and take on another new chapter.
Finders keepers.
347 sq m (3,710 sq ft)
3+ 5
4
D1
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
