Vast vistas from shoulder of hill setting on edge of Cork Harbour for €730k two-faced Fair View

Fair View 'does what it says on the tin,' only twice, with views from within into Cork harbour,  and back out to the ocean in the opposite direction

Fair View is above Fennells Bay, near Myrtleville. Stuart O'Grady of Sherry FitzGerald guides the rectory-lite home with water views to the south and to the west at €730,000

Fennell's Bay, Crosshaven, Cork Harbour
€730,000
Size	156 sq m (1,680 sq ft)-
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	2
BER	B3

JUST like the song line ‘New York, New York, so good they named it twice’, the same could apply to this Crosshaven district home, rooted in history, and witness to comings and goings of all manner of waterborne craft.

With vistas out to the ocean and anchored tankers at the mouth of Cork Harbour in one direction and looking back into the harbour in the other thanks to an elevated, shoulder-of-hill setting, the house called Fair View ‘does what it says on the tin’ ... only it does it on the double.

Two-faced: Fair View 

Fair Views and fair dues all around to this sensitively-kept family home out the road from Crosshaven at Fennell’s Bay, which the owners note originally served as a sort of rectory, or home for retired rectors close to the more formal and larger Church of Ireland rectory on the fringes of Crosshaven, on lands associated for generations with the Hayes family of Crosshaven House.

The rounded flank of land here and its associated coves, bays, and bathing inlets, helps form one of the burly arms protecting and sheltering the expanses of Cork Harbour within, set on the western side, with Roches Point at the eastern side.

On Fair View’s doorstep is Fennell’s Bay, where narrow lanes dotted with houses of all sizes and ambitions drop down to the sea, within a walk of Myrtleville looking out over the reef known as the The Dutchman Rock, and also along the shoreline (much of it navigable at lower tides) are the likes of Myrtleville, Graball, Weavers Point, and Church Bay.

Approach view to Fair View

These addresses will be well-known to generations of Corkonians who holiday here using Crosshaven as the pivot, though over the past 25 years more and more are making the wider district a permanent home, and the momentum post covid shows no sign of diminution.

Sea swimming is, of course, more of a thing than ever before, yet continuing a tradition going back centuries for citizens: back when Crosshaven comprised little more than 100 houses. Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 1837 says that as well as forts and the grandeur of the Hayes family’s Crosshaven House the community comprised “several handsome villas and lodges, the summer residences of those who visit the coast for sea-bathing, closely adjoin the village”.

Sailors dominate Crosshaven too, with boats as valuable as many of the homes onshore, while surfers frequent waves around Fennell’s Bay when condition are right, and all other sorts of boat lovers plot their way around the shoreline here, back to Fountainstown to the west, or Roches Point and Guileen to the east, while Poer Head frames the view to the far east, bookending the horizon.

Views to sea

It’s all about sea vistas at Fair View(s) today too, and the owners of the past decade or so number of years are into all things maritime, and moved here to Fennell’s Bay after a while living in Crosshaven village: with adult children now reared (and with the option of a holiday home still in West Cork), they are set to trade down back to the village.

He’s an academic from mainland Europe, she’s a local Cork woman and worked as an architect (second generation in the design profession) and the house bears the signs of calm care with a subtle aesthetic that works with the house, not imposing to much modernity on it.

Top brass

Yet, the stone-built home dating to the 1880s gets a very good B3 BER, with replacement double glazed sash windows (some with shutters,) and has a feature wood-burning stove on a raised terracotta tiled plinth in the kitchen/dining room, with an exquisite polished brass canopy hood and surround.

Double aspect kitchen/diner

That kitchen/ diner is double aspect, front to back on one side of the central hall, while over on the other side the main room now is also double aspect after an internal wall was removed; there’s an attractive open fireplace in one half and, like the rest of the house, ceilings are nice and high.

Layout is in fact quite simple in what’s in effect a double-faced house, three-bay to the front and to the back and it’s debatable as to which facade counts as the front and which the back.

On approach, the house is rendered and painted white, with porch in front of the entrance door: handy for the prevailing winds.

The blind gable is rendered and when you get around to the ‘back’ of the house there is, in effect a second ‘front’, again with a central door in the three-bay faced and one which is distinguished in looks thanks to a limestone and brick façade, easy and beguiling on the eye.

The woman of the house calls this the front and, putting her architect’s (hard) hat on makes the point that ceiling heights are higher on this entrance, making it the grander one for introducing guests to the house.

While there’s a Church of Ireland ecclesiastical link to its origins, it wasn’t the principal rector: a larger one came with
the top job there and
this, it’s thought, was for easing retirees out, without cutting them off from their parish.

In any case, money wasn’t too short in the church community of the 19th century as the Romanesque Holy Trinity Templebready Parish Church was designed by none other than William Burges, the man responsible for the more French gothic styled St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork city, like Templebready also dating to the 1860s.

Here, up the original and attractive stairs are four double bedrooms (none en suite), two with views directly out to the sea, the other two with views to the harbour over good farmland between Fennell’s Bay and Crosshaven village, plus there’s a family showerroom.

At ground level, there’s a utility room along one side gable, with access to the approach avenue, and behind it is a good bathroom with shower. Separately, a large detached garage has been built to domestic standards, for future upgrade uses?

Selling for the downsizing vendors are Stuart O’Grady and Ann O’Mahony of Sherry FitzGerald, who previously in 2022 got €1.275m for a contemporary build above Myrtleville called Nirvana.

The Price Register shows a handful of other Fennell’s Bay address sales since 2022 at €745,000, €875,000, and €975,000 and Sherry FitzGerald guide this impressively well-kept late 19th century home in a great and sought-after coastal setting at €730,000, adding its BER is impressive, the grounds of half an acre with a lovely evergreen oak framing sea views add to the appeal, and the property has a long-rooted pedigree to the locale.

VERDICT: Fair Views,
indeed

PICTURES: JOHN ROCHE