Whistler hits the market for €1.3m as Bunnyconnellan’s owners prepare move to beloved Myrtleville landmark

O'Brien family selling here to convert Bunnyconnellan's bar/restaurant back to private residential use

Whistler has a top setting on the Coast Road by Fountainstown beach. Agent Roy Dennehy guides the upside down home at €1.3 million for Bunny's and The Lodge bar owners the O'Brien family

Coast Road, Fountainstown, Cork
€1.3 million
Size	200 sq m (2,150 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	4
BER	C1

IT WOULD take a lot to get a family to leave the likes of Whistler, a contemporary upside down home with wide ocean and beach views, in a property hot-spot like Cork’s Fountainstown — but, turns out the vendors have something special up their sleeve, known and loved by them for half a century.

Whistler is a house with studio apartment at the back within a stone's skip of the beach

Selling Whistler are the O’Brien family, who built it back 25 years ago and home since to a couple and two boys. Only moving up the road, the family has deep local roots — they own both Pine Lodge (now The Lodge) and famed Bunnyconnellan’s hospitality ventures, in nearby Myrtleville just to the east along the Coast Road…one of Crosshaven’s increasingly valued Golden Miles.

Whistler's  vendors are to move to fantastically-sited Bunnyconnellan's after taking it off the market

Whistler hits the market with a €1.3 million price guide via agent Roy Dennehy, for a high-end and adaptable four-bed, 2,150 sq ft home, including a self-contained apartment to the rear, plus double garage, at the Fountainstown beach end of the Coast Road.

Why are the O’Brien clan selling? Well, great and all as Whistler and its seaside setting and vista is, they have a bigger, even more exotic fish to fry, at the famed Bunnyconnellan cliffs-set site less than a mile away, set to be their new home.

Set in one of coastal Cork’s most iconic settings, overlooking the mouth of Cork harbour and Roches Point above Myrtleville beach, Bunnyconnellan, or Bunny’s, has been in generations of the O’Brien family’s hands for nigh on 50 years; now it’s about to take another pivot in that property’s long, 200 year history.

Go Whistler

Bunny’s was bought in 1976 by Paddy and Sheila O’Brien, who had previous bars in Cork city (the Marina) and in London, and they further developed the former bar/small hotel owned by the Porteous family, making it their own family home for a period too.

Hugely loved by Corkonians and visitor alike, for its position as well as tradition, Bunny’s closed post-pandemic when the current generation of O’Briens had at peak employed 80 between here and The Lodge (eight chefs alone in Bunny’s), citing staffing and accommodation difficulties at the time.

The Lodge trades well still today, whilst the c 6,000 sq ft Bunny’s on over five acres was put for sale in 2023, guiding €1.9 million. It featured extensively here at the time, gaining both commercial venture offers and residential traction and interest, both as a dramatic one-off private home, or split into several smaller residential sections.

Ground floor bedroom at Whistler

Turns out, the O’Briens picked up on one aspect of the sales pitch (from agents at the time Savills, who had strong inquiries on it) and subsequently decided to restore it as an extended family home, splitting into three sections, for themselves and their adult children, noting their sons — in their 20s — would have the same challenges as any other young person in buying homes for themselves.

Whistler is an upside down home, for the views

They have the design services of an architect friend, Klaus Fleisch from Stuttgart and who has local coastal links too to the area, to adapt the former Bunny’s, which grew from an initial tiny cottage back in the 1820s, in fits and starts, to what it famously became.

Conversion back to residential use won’t need planning permission thanks to legislative changes brought in a few years back to facilitate the repurposing of former pubs and bar to living quarters.

While there will be some public disappointment that a bar won’t run here in such a dramatic setting again ”I think people will be glad it won’t be over-developed” says one of the couple, accepting the quip that generations now will be living cheek-by-jowl, in something akin to the famous Kennedy Compound on Cap Cod…also coincidentally three houses, on c six acres.

In contrast, Whistler is a one-off, in more ways than one, “a must-see, a truly rare opportunity indeed to purchase a substantial, detached residence located in one of South Cork’s most sought after coastal settings, in a private cul de sac” say Dennehy Property.

Open plan upstairs

Whistler had three bedrooms (one en suite) and main bathroom at ground floor, and first floor reception hall, and vast open plan kitchen/living/dining with extensive apex glazing (with electric blackout blinds if needed).

There’s then access to a balcony for views over Fountainstown, Ringabella bay, Ringabella beach, headlands and across to Cork’s outer harbour where yachts sport and tankers berth off-shore, in an ever changing ocean panorama.

Behind, meanwhile on the stepped site is a self-contained one-bed studio apartment.

The Price Register show half a dozen or so €1m+ sales at nearby Crosshaven, where several on the Point Road were bought for this sort of sum, flattened and rebuilt for new, multi-million euro homes with bells and whistles.

The effect and price premiums put on water views and proximity has spilled over the harbour community’s backing hills to Fennells Bay, Myrtleville and Fountainstown and the Coast Road between the latter two beach locations with another raft of €1m+ sales, including the €1.79m paid for the new build called Medjez-El-Bab.

VERDICT: Canada’s Whisler is a well-known snowboarding and ski-resort, at Cork’s Whistler you can water-ski, surf, kayak and sea swim to your heart’s content, then walk back up home for a hot shower and apres ski afterwards.