Shamrock Place, space and grace on Cork's Blackrock Rd
Shamrock Place Ballintemple Blackrock Road
WHEN buying a home that’s over 70 years of age, there’s surely some consolation and peace of mind to know it has been lived in for half of that time by a family with professional involvement in one of the country’s largest civil engineering and construction firms. There are directorial links to Cork-based PH Hegarty & Sons, so you sort of know it’s been well-kept and enhanced and is solid as a rock.
So it appears at the luckily-titled Shamrock Place, on the city end of Cork’s Blackrock Road, which has been consistently improved, and enlarged, with age, and is now both wide and deep, and L-shaped. It’s on great grounds, with an attached garage, and has lots of parking, all behind private electric access gates put in after its main road access was improved with a curved set-back in the front boundary wall.
Now just shy of 3,000 sq ft, and dating to the 1940s, it’s fresh to market for the first time in decades, listed with a price tag of €1.5 million with Sheila O’Flynn and Ann O’Mahony of Sherry FitzGerald, one of their several €1m+2020 property listings in the suburbs, and their main, fresh Blackrock listing for the moment.
Shamrock Place seems to hold part of a footprint with a much earlier property with ‘Shamrock’ in its name or pedigree, as its next-door detached neighbour on the city side is called Shamrock Lawn, and several other smaller houses to the side also have ‘Shamrock’ in their addresses.
The location is just on the city side of Crab Lane and of Ballintemple village, and as it’s on the southern side of the Blackrock Road, or the right-hand side leaving town and thus has a southerly aspect to its back.
It’s one very mature gardens of 0.3 of an acre, ringed in on two sides by a high, old stone wall. Over that feature stone back wall are glimpses of a Crab Lane property called 'Montana', sold in 2017 for €1.14m, on circa one acre. 'Montana' dates to 1920 and had initially carried a €1.5m price hope and needed a good deal of modernising.
Also of the same vintage on Shamrock Place’s grounds is a large Monterey Cypress which has all the signs of being a healthy 100-year old and a garden feature: such cypresses, or macrocarpa, are most common in California, or New Zealand, but seem to do well also in the southwest of Ireland.
Here, the venerable tree (which has been trimmed every now and then to keep it in healthy check) is crying out for a circling ring of garden seating around its sturdy base, or for the next family of occupants perhaps to insert a treehouse into its spreading branches?
It’s trading downtime now for the owners, who’ve been here 35 years and who took it on from an earlier generation of their clan in 1985. They say it had been originally built for a local Jewish family, the Sherlings, and a testament to Jewish religion and rituals are the several small Mezuzahs attached to the door frames of several of the living rooms.
Traditionally, these small angled features are tiny containers (often, decorative) which are placed at the top right of a frame, and the mezuzahs each hold a small parchment with a small inscription in Hebrew, obeying the Biblical mitzvah or commandment to “write the words of God on the gates and doorposts of your house”. Here, they’re not on every door opening, especially as there’s been reconfiguration and alterations down the years.
Among the changes at Shamrock Place was the addition of a ground floor game room back in 1998, on the property’s 50th birthday. This was later upgraded to a sunny garden room as it was just off the kitchen and opens to a sheltered patio. Then, in 2007, the family added a first-floor extension/main bedroom suite on top of the original flat roof, with a feature corner window overlooking the garden and lawns.
Along the way, they also added a porch to the front, where there is now an entry vestibule for shelter, next to a guest WC.
After the changes, there are now four reception rooms, most of them overlooking the south-aspected back garden, and the living/dining room to the right of the central hall is double depth, front to back, linked by a broad arch, with coved ceilings, gas insert fireplace in a pale granite surround, and both conjoined rooms have parquet hardwood floors, gleaming.
Gleaming too is the narrow-strip solid wood floor in the hall and home office/breakfast room with a bay window to its left (a fireplace in this room has been covered over for the moment), while the extra-wide staircase in the hall is graced by stout turned spindles and pitch pine handrail/banister.
Also in the ground floor mix is a family/sitting room, with stove and French doors to the south-facing patio, and there’s also a very good kitchen with classical white units, island, and granite tops, and this room leads then to the deep garden rooms, recently updated and, again, with patio access.
Above are five bedrooms, four of them doubles and there are two very good ones, each en-suite with good-sized private bathrooms. One, the more original or older, is double aspect with the third aspect a possibility if a frosted window in the en-suite bathroom is replaced with clear glass, a tempting possibility, given it would open great back garden views.
The more upscale second en-suite bedroom, over the extension and done in 2007, is most likely going to be taken as the "principal" suite, given it’s large, with a double aspect corner window, has an excellent bathroom, plus a large well-shelved dressing room/walk-in robes.
Furthermore, depending on the next owners' age profile/family stage, a fifth bedroom by the corridor to this "suite" can be used as a nursery if babies are in hand, or could be a "bail-out/kick-out room" if there’s a bit of active and annoying snoring going on.
First viewings of this big (but, not too big) family home kick off from this weekend, with the lure of a Blackrock Road location and address adding a frisson: we’re thinking Ask Audrey’s ‘Reggie, Blackrock Road’ and his €4.5m mansion podcast rambling here, and Shamrock Place weighs in at one-third of ‘Reggie’s notional home’s value, at ‘just’ €1.5 million.
With a number of €1-2m Blackrock house sales to Sherry FitzGerald’s credit in the past few years (including sites at €500k), agent Sheila O’Flynn is confident of their pricing, and adds “you can tell immediately it’s been done by someone in the construction profession given the attention to detail, finishes, and maintenance: you’d be so confident of it, even without a survey.”
Colleague Ann O’Mahony adds that due to regular upkeep and care, “it’s truly a modern home, needing no work, bar whatever changes its next owners might want to make.”
VERDICT: Great as it stands, and putting the "rock" into Blackrock, Shamrock Place is a banker of a buy, and another owner may take it to an even higher level again, as there’s scope for this high-level spend along the road.
- Blackrock Road, Cork City
- €1.5 million
- Size: 278 sq m (2,990 sq ft)
- Bedrooms: 5
- Bathrooms: 4
- BER: C2
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