Historic Montenotte €1.95 million home beckons for modern merchant princes

Chance to write your own chapter in the long history of Cork's Hyde Park House

Sun, 03 Oct, 2021 - 12:53

Exclusive residence in Cork has links to our first president and comes to the marketplace in impeccable condition, writes Tommy Barker Pictures Niamh Whitty

Montenotte, Cork City
€1.95 million
Size	613 sq m (6,600 sq ft)
Bedrooms	6
Bathrooms	9
BER	BER: D2

HOUSES hardly come steeped in as much local history as Cork’s city and River Lee-scanning Hyde Park House can rightly lay claim to.

Much of that is owed to the fact it dates back well over 200 years, and has been continuously occupied by families, for all that span of time.

Internal elegance in pristine period home

Its wide range of family owners started with clergy, with a later family link to Ireland’s first president, Douglas Hyde, as well changing occupiers over the following decades and centuries as many scions of Cork’s moneyed, merchant classes moved in, moved out, and moved on.

Elevated Hyde Park House in Cork's 'lofty' Montenotte is on 2.5 acres of award-winning grounds

Among the owners and occupiers have been Quaker merchant families like Haughtons and Carrolls, Protestants and leading Catholic business, brewing and distilling family dynasties like the Murphys, railway men, military men and men of the cloth – both religious, and clothing manufacturers, such as the Dwyers.

House and a half. Hyde Park House is a combined 6,600 sq ft, and has two main entrances, two staircases, great reception rooms and six first floor bedrooms

And apart from the Hyde first Irish presidential family link (Douglas Hyde, in 1939) there’s even a link to a second president, General Eisenhower who later became US President, whose WW2 assistant, driver and lover Kay Summersby was born a McCarthy Morrogh, and whose ancestors had lived here at Hyde Park House in the mid-1800s.

Immaculate grounds, complete privacy, and fully overhauled by its owners of the past four decades

Others who enjoyed living at the expansive and elevated Hyde Park House included families like the Goldies, and the Gouldings (of fertiliser business fame), both of them into domestic gardening, at the highest scale… as are the current owners, Jerry and Patricia Carey.

Made for entertaining on quite a grand scale.

They bought here in the 1980s, and are now trading down (to the lodge) from a pristine period home, on an immaculate 2.5 acres, with stone gazebo and look out points, ponds, patios, veg plot, professional-scale planting, and a small paddock for a pony.

Colour in the grounds, along with pergola, gazebo, ponds - and a paddock for a pony?

During the Carey family’s tenure here, the gardens have occasionally been open to the public for fundraisers and good causes has won national awards and was redesigned by the noted, late landscape designer and artist Brian Cross who had, himself, spent some of his childhood growing up in Hyde Park House.

All of this connection, with property and gardens, is well within the city curtilage, and a ten-minute walk to St Luke’s Cross, and its cafes, bars, deli, shops, and schools, with McCurtain Street beyond, and the city’s docks unfurling to C21st renewal, visible beneath. Ye gods.

Hyde Park House is fresh to market as a real prize period property, for the first time in decades, with a €1.95m AMV quoted by selling agent Sheila O’Flynn of Sherry FitzGerald Cork, who says it’s got to be one of the very best Cork city houses and private grounds to come along in years.

Clive Christian-made kitchen with gas-fired Aga

For her listing, she’s drafted in colleague Roseanne De Vere Hunt of Sherry FitzGerald Country Homes who operate internationally with Christies, and who might be familiar now to TV viewers from the RTÉ show Selling Ireland’s Most Exclusive Homes (very much the opposite end of the scale of RTÉ’s other current show, Cheap Irish Homes).

With its Montenotte address, expansive grounds with three access points, sweeping main entrance pillars and gates, plus long avenue, Hyde Park House indeed would have been worthy of TV exposure by Ms De Vere Hunt. Even , at the €1.95m guide, though, it would have been at the lower end of the price bracket in that now-finished three-part show!

One of the reception rooms with mid C20th fireplace

Who’ll be next to call Hyde Park House ‘home?’ Will it be a family, once more, seizing a prize period property in fantastic, great shape, on 2.5 lovingly tended city acres?

Or, might it find some other use? Boutique hotel, a la Hayfield Manor? Exclusive guest or even retirement community? It’s all to play for, as it comes to market for the first time in nearly 50 years, and quite probably in better physical health than in decades.

Four poster bed in one of the six bedrooms

Set on high, both socially and topographically at lofty Montenotte, this fine, well-kept and minded house is thought to date to the late 1700s, and as such is one of the earlier mansions built on the bracing, south-facing burly and wooded hills east of Cork city.

The house even predates the Italianate name of Montenotte, which only came into vogue in Cork after the 1830s, likely to have applied first to a private house, and recalling a battle victory by Napoleon over English forces: by contrast, many of Cork’s St Luke’s district other addresses recall English victories over Napoleon.

Gardens were designed in the late 1980s by the noted Cork landscape designer Brian Cross, who spend some of his childhood years at Hyde Park House in Montenotte

Accounts of Cork’s Merchant Princes building their Montenotte mansions along the high hills running east of the old city, towards and past Tivoli to Glanmire’s deep valley, are pretty well known, and the earlier houses show distinctly in noted paintings of the day, by the likes of Nathaniel Grogan and Thomas Sautelle Roberts.

A 40-page history of Hyde Park House and its Montenotte roots was prepared for a National Heritage Week presentation back in 2017 by former registrar of Cork Institute of Technology (CIT, now MTU) Brendan Goggin, who retired that same year. Hyde Park House is one of the early mansions depicted on the then-densely wooded hillside, associated in its very earliest days with a Rev Arthur Hyde, whose family had already - by the C18th century - had several centuries’ links to estates in Cork, with their 6,000-acre seat later at Castle Hyde near Fermoy.

The Rev Arthur Hyde served in Church of Ireland parishes as far apart as Derry and West Cork and became Rector of St Anne’s Shandon, with Hyde Park House’s construction put between this time and 1791 when it was sold to a family called Halburd.

Hyde Park House is one of the historic gems, with ‘good, grounded neighbours’ of historical note between St Luke’s Cross and Tivoli (where there’s a clutch of mansions with ‘Lota’ in their titles) having included Woodhill, Vosterburg, Clifton House, St Brandon’s, Arbutus House, St Raphael’s, Ennismore, Trafalgar, Woodlands and Beech Hill, Summerhill and Myrtle Hill House, and it’s among the best surviving, intact and presented homes.

Somewhat confusingly Montenotte for many years had not one, but two Hyde Parks, with one now a nursing home, Care Choice and part converted to units, as Douglas Hyde Apartments, while the actual Hyde Park House stayed in private usage all the while, split briefly into two and in two ownerships.

Sunny kitchen opens to a sun room with terrace and garden access

It was then, thankfully, seamlessly reamalgamated back to its full 6,600 sq ft combined, with the finer portion on the left, with a pair of two-story canted baywindows and fine, formal main hall with graceful fluted Ionic pilasters and low-rise, D-shaped staircase, while there’s both internal and external access to a first-floor entertaining suite/former ballroom, used in the quite recent past for family weddings.

Sherry FitzGerald’s Sheila O’Flynn, and Roseanne De Vere Hunt, say that “as the generous layout also includes a second entrance and hallway, and second staircase, there are options to make a home for the extended family, to accommodate staff, or create a home- working suite,” and “the addition of plentiful storage and a workshop gives marvelous flexibility to adapt and reach the full potential of whatever a new owner might require.”

Second entrance hall to northern end of Hyde Park House

After the Carey family bought in the 1980s, the property was upgraded and future-proofed for their tenure and beyond.

It got reroofed, got new heating and electrics, got period-appropriate furnishings and fittings, chandeliers among the lighting fixtures, many included in this sale. The gardens were fully overhauled, to Brian Cross’ planting plan, with skilled and knowledgeable gardeners keeping it to spec ever since. (The neat and tidy garden store-room has shelves of reference books, and even a vase or two of cut flowers, as entitled to them as any of the formal rooms within the main house.)

External access to a wing with first floor ballroom/entertaining room. It has scope for home office suites, granny flat or other independent uses

Windows were replaced with what was in vogue at the time, double glazed uPVC, so a new owner who’s a purist may opt at some time to reinstate crafted timber sash window with slender double glazed panes now that they are more readily available.

At 6,600 sq ft it’s large, with six pristine first-floor bedrooms across its two wings or sections (and scope for more,) and has formal reception rooms with fireplaces, bay windows, ornate plasterwork and other period detailing, as well as a home office, playroom, gym, first floor library, compact basement with wine cellar and children’s hiding play area.

Another view of dining room, with canted bay window

It is, indeed, highly comfortable, and currently extensively and appropriately furnished house.

Owners Jerry and Patricia (‘Tric’) Carey are well known in Cork, via various business ventures, from business equipment and furnishing to technology and numerous board positions across a wide spectrum.

And, Tric Carey - who self-deprecatingly quips “we might live in a posh house, but we’re not posh” - owned and ran Cork’s private Skerries College for a number of years. Her Skerries’ notable alumni include Anne O’Leary, CEO of Vodafone Ireland, along with one Sheila O’Flynn, MD of Sherry FitzGerald Cork, whose ‘homework’ now carries high stakes in the case of the sale of Hyde Park House.