‘Lavender’ right for picking at a descent price
Guided at €1.25m, it comes back to the market, after it was floated in 2013 at €2.2m, reports
The changes have been rung, and wrung, at Lavender Heights in recent years.
Often times, the mark of a home that has had serious cash investment in it is where the master bedroom is sort of five-star sanctuary, hotel standard retreat, with a relaxing, spa-like bathroom to match.
Not only is that the case here, but the accompanying gym and indoor, heated swimming pool would hold its head up in the similar, five-star accommodation company.
Now, this Rochestown home, which has had as much money poured into it as has water passed through its slick swimming pool, is back up for sale, via agent Brian Olden of Cohalan Downing. With a €1m price drop.
Guided at €1.25m as it comes back to the open market, five years after it was floated in 2013 at an AMV of €2.2m, Lavender Heights is now a very much a one-off, in just about every sense, with just the faintest outline of the original dormer home left in evidence.
Having been bought a decade or so ago by a fitness and sports-obsessed Cork financial investor, who lived and traded as much in Monaco as he had done in Cork, the 7,400 sq ft property with hotel-standard ‘leisure centre’ and grounds, is now empty of furniture, having been rented out as a very high-end corporate let in the interim.
At its last guide of €2.2m in 2013, as the market was only coming out of the doldrums, it was unlikely to find a buyer unless it was someone with as deep pockets and a keen love of Cork. It was the sort of place that may be a Roy Keane might go for or a Lotto winner.
With €1m shaved off the price, and still a top-drawer product, it’s going to have a slightly wider appeal at its €1.25m asking price: after all, the location is in Cork’s Rochestown, high up above the main Rochestown road, with expansive views over the inner harbour and Hop Island, and, best of all, it’s on 7.4 acres of ground, with considerable privacy, and bristling with security and CCTV cameras.
If you’ve made a nice few quid, and you want to enjoy it in privacy and security in an accessible suburb, then Lavender Heights has the scent of success to it.
And, the ring road, Mahon’s booming business parks and the Jack Lynch tunnel are just five minutes away by car, or by fast motorbike: in fact, on the Irish Examiner’s last visit to this house half a decade ago, a 1200 cc Harley Davidson motorbike was parked indoors, by the pool’s edge. It has only a few miles up on its odometer, and the owner placed it there because he thought it looked muscular and sculptural. So very rock star chic, or indulgent.
On display too were some serious, super-light racing cycles, better stuff than you’d see on Saturday or Sunday weekend Irish ‘pelothon’ of Middle-Aged Men in Lycra (Mamils) while the owner admitted at that time that the pool had a counter current device fitted so that “when it’s on, you can don a snorkel and swim all you like and never reach the back wall.”
That pool is 11-metres long, with feature Liscannor stone wall and has an unusual membrane ceiling, stretched in shiny black Barrisol rubber, while the water is naturally filtered and oxygenated via E-clear technology, free of chlorine, smells and red-rimed eyes.
It was built by the vendor after he had bought what was a quite standard ’80s build, albeit 4, 800 sq ft dormer with Georgian-style window panes and a lofted double garage.
He vastly upgraded and enlarged it, the pool and sports complex links to what’s now a gym with overhead guest bedroom, and, then, most dramatically, right across the front of the main house he added a long, all-glazed pod, about 10m in length, and four metres deep and another four metres high, done as a domestic take on commercial glazing, complete with glass fins and bronzed ‘spider’ clamps: it utterly transforms the house’s impact, and utility.
Internally, not a square foot of the original Lavender House wasn’t altered or moved/refinished in some way, and it’s all high-end, costly stuff, much of it completely hand-made and bespoke, such as the home office desk in cascading ash, almost like a lava flow of sinuous curves, only rock solid.
There are four bedrooms in the main block, reached via a floating timber and glass baluster staircase, and off the master bedroom is a very large dressing room, with an entire wall of curved wardrobe doors in cherrywood, along with an almost throne-like seat, looking out over the harbour beyond.
The en-suite has underfloor heating, one other bedroom has a full en-suite, and the remaining two others are done in a Jack and Jill arrangement; all sanitary ware is Villeroy & Boch, bedrooms have lots of built-ins, and a laundry chute drops linen down to the (marble-floored) utility as and when required.
At ground is a Kahrs oak parquet-floored living room with Wenge timber inset and limestone wall-mounted fireplace, the home office is simply extraordinary, a wood-lined den for business and markets’ dealings by day or night in previous incarnations, and the hall’s a feature of glistening modernity in its own right.
The home’s heart is the long kitchen/dining/casual living room, about 30’ long, with Siematic kitchen and island, and stuffed with appliances from the likes of Gaggenau and Neff, including wine cooler: this room also opens to the glass box or pod in front, floored in limestone and where there’s also a wood-burning stove.
Look out from here, towards the harbour, and there’s another water feature in the near-distance, along runnel or channel cut into a limestone front terrace... bobs not spared, inside or outside.
The house’s massive overhaul was overseen by Paul Keating of Keating Architects, Cork, and other features include air conditioning, central vacuum, oil heating and upgraded uPVC sash windows, bespoke joinery with hand-made and inlaid doors, feature geometric wall patterns in contrasting timber shades, hi-tech security and other all-singing/all-dancing/all-swimming technology, from the E-Clear filtered pool to what was noted in 2013 as a €150,000 investment in Bang & Olufson sound and screens, in a media room and elsewhere.
Lavender Heights comes for sale with Cohalan Downing as a late 2018 Cork offer in the €1m-plus league, joining about 18 other city/region/suburban homes on the market in this rarified price bracket with at least two in Rochestown, currently) and where only a small handful have transacted as family home purchases during the overall, unevenly-performing year.VERDICT: Fit, for purpose.
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