Make this Lindville house your ‘Temple’

Ballintemple, Cork city

€985,000

Size: 246 sq m (2,657 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 4/5

Bathrooms: 4

BER: C3

No 45 Lindville, Ballintemple, has a Victorian architectural architectural design right up your street, says Tommy Barker

Where lies Lindville now, where lie ‘recovery’ and ‘confidence?’

A pretty well-known, upmarket house development, completed around 2000, with over 60 homes done to a Victorian architectural design palette, off the Blackrock Road in Cork’s Ballintemple, Lindville has always been an outlier as to where ‘confidence and supply’ in the city’s upper end of the market, is at.

It comprised 64 houses, many of them large three-storey detacheds built in the original grounds of a private, family-owned hospital. At market peak, at least one changed hands for well over €1 million: that was after its initial developers went into liquidation and after 10 sites within were sold off to complete the scheme, reckoned to be the most exclusive in the city at the time.

Since Lindville’s arrival and delivery, the Blackrock Road address and location between the city and quays, through Ballintemple and out to Blackrock village and Castle Road, has continued to grow in prestige and prices.

Blackrock Road accounts for more €1m-plus house sales than any other location in the southern city and surrounds, and the sell-out, off-plans, of the c 30-unit Botanika development at Cleve Hill last year only served to underline the point, with new builds snapped up at c €850,000 a pop, and the Botanika site is advancing steadily towards completion.

The 2012-introduced Price Register charts Blackrock Road’s price pre-eminence. However, it only covers sales back to 2010, when the market was in a slump, and since 2010 there have only been six Lindville sales recorded.

Curiously, two of the listings were for the same house, No 45, showing up in 2011 at €950,000, and again in 2013 at €625,000.

At the time, market sources suggested the €950k figure recorded was some sort of asset/pension transfer for its owners at the time, tile shop owner and businessman Chris Dineen and family, who went on to build a modern mansion at a multi-million euro cost on the main Blackrock Road.

No 45 Lindville had been marketed in 2010, at €1.2m, and it then came back for sale, and changed hands by 2013, at the reported €625,000.

In the interim, No 54 Lindville also came for sale, and sold in 2015 for €738,000, well in excess of its initial €650,000 launch-level guide. Also going over its asking was another detached, the 2,600 sq ft No 33, which guided in 2015 at €695,00 and which sold according to the Register for €735,000.

Now, five years after buying No 45, its occupants have put it up for sale, in still tip-top condition and lavishly supplied with elaborately tiled bathrooms. It’s guided at €985,000 by agent Trish Stokes of Lisney, who says it’s going down very well on initial and early viewings.

No 45 weighs in at over 2,600 sq ft over three levels, with up to five bedrooms, two of them up at ‘attic’ level and each is en suite, with showers.

The mid-level is home to two large bedrooms, and one small single bedroom or optional office study. To the front is the master suite, with walk-in robes and large, private fully-tiled bathroom with large corner jetted Jacuzzi bath, next to a corner shower enclosure with pumped shower, there’s an anti-fog mirror and the room’s wired for sound.

The main family bathroom is at this level, also. Again it’s fully-tiled, wall to ceiling, with a stand-alone roll-top antique style slipper bath, by a broad tiled washstand on stone columns.

At ground floor of this deep and tall home are interconnecting reception rooms, effectively double aspect and linked by a broad arch with corbels, with coved ceilings, cherry wood floors, recessed lighting, main fireplace and there’s a bay window to the front.

Behind, is a full width, 23’ by 13’ kitchen/dining room, by a utility with side-of-house exterior access, and units are topped with teak, incldue dressers and a wine press, and worktops are backed by lustrous glossy splashback tiles, while the flooring from the hall to the rear is a tumbled stone tile.

Then, a couple of steps down lead to a rear patio-facing sun room/family space, walnut-floored with a further fireplace in situ, and next, beyond and past a well-presented deck terrace is where there’s yet another surprise, in terracotta style floor tiles.

The central core of No 45’s back garden, down a few steps from the deck, has been surfaced with terracotta tiles giving a sort of mediterannean look, while the perimeter boundaries are very densely stocked and planted up, behind and above low dwarf walls, with a mix of flower beds, climbing ivies, shrubs and trees, including a tiered ‘wedding cake’ tree.

The ease of maintenance that comes with no lawn or grass will appeal to many, especially those who’ve seen lawns wither and turn brown over this past droughty summer with a hose-pipe ban, and especially those who welcome the fact there was so little growth, that summer lawn cutting just wasn’t necessary.

The no-lawn feature doesn’t seem to be bothering the first viewers, says Lisney’s Trish Stokes, and unless someone desperately wants to seed it and is prepared for the extra bit of work, there’s plenty of communal and green areas within Lindville for children to play on, as well as the retained century-old trees of the original Lindville hospital’s approach avenue, a sort of breathing lung for inhabitants, birds and wildlife.

VERDICT: Tiled and styled.