Well-bread in Cork's Woodview as €850k bungalow with pedigree comes to market

Family who built Moyard in back  garden have Thompsons bakery background: it's worth some dough

Scope galore: Moyard is off Woodview and the  Douglas Road: agents Cohalan Downing guide at €850,000

Woodview, Douglas, Cork
€850,000
Size	217 sq m (2,325 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	3
BER	N/A

Thompson family-linked house could make good dough

The bungalow Moyard was built in 1974 in a cul de sac off Woodview and owned by the FH Thompson Brewitt family, says Tommy Barker

THERE is lots, and lots of history behind Moyard, a one-off, low-slung bungalow yet one of surprising stature, in an under-the-radar address: It’s off Woodview and Cork’s Douglas Road, which is currently home to the city’s highest-priced home offer, the €2.95m Kendalsbrae, which featured with a splash in these pages in late March.

Moyard is in a cul de sac off Woodview in Douglas

Two doors away, on the ‘Quiet Millionaire’s Quarter Mile’, Moyard was built in 1974 in the long back garden and former orchard of the 1905 classic Edwardian Well Road house, Ellerslie, by the Brewitt family (who were long associated with historic Cork bakery, FH Thompson, a fabled and much-loved institution, famed for its breads and cakes).

Ellerslie, Well Road in 2014. File picture: Denis Scannell

Founded in 1826, the bakery carried the name of Francis Hannon (FH) Thompson up to its closure in the mean 1980s, a recessionary decade when Cork lost thousands of jobs across dozens of major employers, after earlier ‘boomier’ decades (and, centuries) when Thompson’s expanded to include three city centre cafes, and was producing Swiss rolls at the rate of a mile of rolled-out cake a day.

On a (Swiss) roll: Thomspons in the early 1950s 

The Brewitt family lived in the Well Road’s three-storey Ellerslie from the 1950s until George and Jill Brewitt traded down in the early 1970s, building Moyard, a then innovative, timber-framed, single-storey, 2,3000 sq ft home.

Moyard's setting

It was built on a verdant 0.45-acre garden, behind the rear, red-brick pillared entrance to Ellerslie (pic far right).

A hideaway home, Moyard comes for sale now, for the first time, after the passing of Jill Brewitt, who lived here up to her 99th year, and following the death of former WH Thompson director George in 2011.

Knead to know: Eliza Thompson in 1850

Coming to ‘for sale’ viewings, one of the spacious home’s five bedrooms has been kept as the late owner’s own art studio and some of his own work is on the walls here — as is an oil painting of one Eliza Thompson, who married Francis H Thompson; the painting dates to 1850, reckons oldest son Simon, who says the same Eliza was the great, great, great grandmother of his and three other siblings, Jenny, John and Peter.

Apart from baking heritage, engineering seems to be a family tradition, over four generations, and the Brewitt family took a keen interest in the building of Moyard, done in timber frame on firm foundations and with its external leaf in brick and cedar panels by an Irish company called Guildway Homes (possibly linked to a UK company of the same name and previously Cedar Homes and which dated to the 1950s.)

“Timber frame is nothing new, it’s been around in Scandinavia and elsewhere for centuries and well-built ones last for generations,” Simon observes on an Irish Examiner walk around the very well-kept house, sizeable double garage and very mature gardens, with spring flowers in abundance, shrubs happily rooted for decades, alive with bird song, and ringed by trees that long predate this bungalow, including a fruitful apple tree (an eater) that’s at least a century old.

Moyard is a half century itself, and has aged well, with good maintenance and house-keeping along the way, but has dated decoratively and is likely to see considerable change once in new hands — and it’s adaptable and ready for it.

It’s listed with Malcolm Tyrrell and Brian Olden, of Cohalan Downing, with a €850,000 AMV, and in many instances that’s a good price hope for a bungalow.

But, this is Woodview, and in the ‘select’ cul de sac section of it, too, with only a half a dozen homes in all along its dog-leg length, and is likely to be the most affordable on the row.

Kendalsbrae

That’s some point to make, but it’s likely, for sure: Two doors away, Kendalsbrae is offered by Cohalan Downing at €2.95m, and next door to Kendalsbrae is Currabeg, built on equally private grounds after the original house there, Currabeg, at the bend in Woodview was bought for €2.4m and demolished.

There are two other, very good detacheds built in the past 25 years or thereabouts, and next door to Moyard is a substantial modern home, built in the back garden of Ellerslie’s Edwardian Well Road neighbour, Palmiera.

All of those are in the €1m+ category, making Moyard, at €850k, the ‘entry level’ option to this hidden Woodview nexus.

(Want even more hidden? There’s a very substantial, early 1990s detached home, Glanseskin House, on the village side of Moyard, past a discrete lodge on the Douglas Road and much eyed ‘back in the boom’ by builders, but its generation of family owners resolutely have since kept it to themselves.)

Keep up with the neighbours?

As Moyard’s own construction was timber frame, any and all internal walls can be moved with relative ease as they are in timber stud, so internal reconfiguration could be very easy.

It has its main living space in an L shape, with a large living room linked to a dining room off the hall by the entry point, with quite basic, but spotless, kitchen behind, with a serving hatch between the cooking and eating rooms. Down the L-shaped hall are up to five bedrooms, with main bathroom done wet-room style, with adjacent shower room.

The main bedroom is at the far end of the home, with dressing area/robes and private en suite bathroom.

Bake off: kitchen is of its time

Prospective buyers might see scope for a large additional living room in the adjacent double garage, either a conversion or a rebuild, over one of two levels.

Others might consider making Moyard two storeys, but there’d have to be engineering adjustments at the least: Steels inside the timber frame?

Others with substantial budgets (and that’s who will be looking here with the most gimlet of eyes) might simply remove the solid, C2-rated Moyard and, instead, replace it in its entirety with a 21st century contemporary build, subject to planning permission.

Pillars of old Cork

It’s set behind sturdy gates and the old red-brick former rear entry pillars of Ellerslie, facing the entry point to Woodview’s cul-de-sac section on the main Douglas road, with planning precedents both along Woodview’s main section (including a copper-faced one by the roundabout on the Well Road) and the Douglas Road for replacement builds: planners even allowed the seeming indignity of a detached house to be built in the front garden of Ellerslie itself, onto the Well Road.

Now, what will bring up Ellerslie’s rear as its 1970s offshoot, Moyard, comes up for the taking?

VERDICT: A good house on a great site: sensitive hands, into deep pockets, are needed next.