When an (Alfa) Romeo met a Glanmire Giulietta: €815k Cork home to international couple is a bit of  classic in its own right

An edge-of-city Cork home designed to be open plan with a contemporary feel is impressive and airy: and, it even has a 'professional' hobbyist's garage with car lift, writes Tommy Barker

No 8 Cuil Cluthair, Sallybrook, Glanmire, in Cork city is set at a wooded hideaway.

“Write about the house, not the cars or the garage.” That was the plea from estate agent Jackie Cohalan, after a property visit to 8 Cuil Cluthair. To be fair, it is a whole lot more than a garage with a house attached ... even if the garage has a car lift, and appears as well equipped and clean as a hospital operating theatre, for saving the life of old cars.

No 8’s a one-off edge-of-city Cork home which was built with a passion by an international couple, and whose passion also spills over into renovating old, classic Italian Alfa Romeo cars, banishing rust like some car-scavenging coronavirus and, now too, running a website Alfa Beta Classics showing the road to Alfa salvation.

Wheel nuts: No 8 has a dream workshop with mechanic's lift for classic car lovers. For anyone else, it could be a gym, games room or office

He’s from near Lisbon, she’s from Australia, and they met up in Cork back in the 1990s, in Isaacs’ hostel. ”it was one of the first places in Cork with an espresso machine,” they recall.

Back then, she was doing the Aussie ‘world tour’ thing, and he was working as a mechanic in a motorbike shop, when he was given a job after being given the challenge to restore an absolute two-wheeled wreck, reckoned to have been practically unsalvageable.

He did that with aplomb, and both their careers progressed, and by the mid-2000s they were in a position to build their dream home, their first time building from scratch: this is what they did, from design to delivery.

Set at a wooded hideaway at Sarsfield Court, by Glanmire and the M8 (for exhaust-rasping Alfa Romeo road tests) No 8’s an impressive and airy home of 4,200 sq ft, with an integrated 500 sq ft garage — more on this feature anon — which they say was deliberately designed to be very open plan, in a contemporary style, reflecting the look of places they liked as far away as Australia, and as near to home as Portugal.

But, now after about a quarter of a century in Cork, as well as spells living and working abroad in other countries and cultures, they are off, having secured a site near the Atlantic coast with views, a short distance north of Lisbon. Hence, their uprooting from the pristine and capacious No 8 Cuil Cluthair (the name translates loosely as ‘Sheltered Rear’). It’s one of 12 one-off homes built 10 to 15 years ago, off an attractive wooded sloping hillside near the top of Sallybrook and Sarsfields Court, on the run out from Glanmire to the Cork-Dublin M8.

The majority of the dozen were built in the mid to late 2000s, are contemporary in style, as requested by planners at the time, and featuring strongly are stone trim, cedar sheeting, metal cladding and membrane roofs, of all sizes, shapes and roof pitches.

No 8 in particular features many of these finishes, along with shade screens or brise soleil, in polished stainless steel, and has asymmetrical roof profiles, balconies, connects to the ground on its two levels and was built using then-innovative and highly effective ICF, or Insulated Concrete Framework, where concrete is poured into twin walls of thick polystyrene, and as a result, this big home gets a highly credible B2 BER.

All of Cuil Cluthair’s builds are large, reflective of the Celtic Tiger times they were conceived and constructed in, about 3,000 sq ft upwards apiece, on sites of typically half an acre.

Each property is now pretty private within the enclave, due to owners’ extra budgets for landscaping (credit here is given to Alan Kenneally and Hillside Nurseries in Glounthaune) along the site’s long linear length, and resales are rare indeed.

One, the only unfinished home, got offered a year or two back, with builders now on-site and before that, it was 2008 when the first one came for sale. Then, No 5 was offered with a €1.15m price tag by the businessman who sold the sites in the first place next to his older home, and was a 3,300 sq foot ‘upside down’ layout family home on 0.4 of an acre.

Now, No 8 Cuil Cluthair comes for sale, priced at €815,000 by Cohalan Downing auctioneer Jackie Cohalan, who has had some recent strong sales locally around Sallybrook, including one at the Hermitage for €850,000, while another Hermitage home made €805,000. The Price Register shows six sales with a Sallybrook address in excess of €525,000, including one, Ardilaun at €1.1m.

Presenting like a brand new build inside and out, save for the maturity of its grounds which shows its deepening roots, No 8 is a spacious five-bed, with a smallish number of reception rooms given the overall floor area in excess of 4,000 sq ft, and behind the ICF build were brothers Daniel and Kieran Fitzgerald from Mallow, who the vendors say were exemplary in their attention to detail and finishes: “We wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them … people probably don’t often say that about their builders.” 

The owners decided they really wanted open-plan, and went for it, with an entrance hall past its double doors which is larger than many hotels’ foyers, yet surprisingly kept ‘domestic’ despite the area and height, with a section soaring right up to the mono-pitch ceiling high atop the first-floor landing, itself a space big enough to host yoga classes for a gang.

The entry hall, with seating and the landing directly above it are each about 23’ by 21’, or 480 sq ft, and the stairs and return joining them (with feature tall window for a view of an ash tree) is done with oak treads with metal strip inserts, and handrails of smooth, rounded stainless steel.

Off the hall, to the right, is an even larger space, the kitchen/dining/living room has twice the floor area, about 900 sq ft thanks to a depth of 38’ and width of 24’ (11.7mX7.5m), with an enormous island and worktops in hardwood timber, around gloss units and integrated appliances.

This room has flooring that’s a mix of tiles and refinished, gleaming oak, and the kitchen’s back wall is marked out by a wide, shallow window that gives only glimpses of the garden sloping away and upwards to the back, while French doors open to a super-sized side terrace or patio for outdoor dining.

This ‘heart of the home’ is triple aspect, with views of garden greenery in each direction, and the living section itself is home to a large, wall-set and side vented wood-burning stove.

Design and layout were pretty much all by the owners themselves (a local architected did up the planning and construction drawings) and a clever touch was putting in dropped ceilings sections over the kitchen island and central living core by the stove, which breaks the massive expanse of the ceiling, with created recess used for feature, dimmable strip lighting.

Selling agent Jackie Cohalan says that “despite the scale of the property, it does not feel vast or cold, but actually exudes a calm luxurious ambiance that entices the senses”, adding that “this substantial detached home is all about attention to detail”. 

The home has a ground floor bedroom/gym/study, a guest bathroom, a plant room that holds the various ‘brains’ of the house as well as the sophisticated CCTV system which can be monitored from anywhere in the world, and other tech touches apart from lighting include surround sound, zoned gas central heating, central vacuum and the like.

Overhead are five bedrooms, two of them linked to bathrooms in a ‘Jack and Jill’ set-up, and there’s also an en-suite bathroom (with bath plus shower) with the main bedroom, which has walk-in robes.

The main family bathroom has a bath, and as in the other bathrooms, tiling is individual, restrained and of a style that’s not dated. Also at the property’s upper level is a utility room that can, effectively, double as a second kitchen such is its layout, just needing an oven or so, has exterior access to a raised terrace, and could be ideal for an older relative, guest, au pair or adult offspring.

As No 8 Cuil Cluthair comes for sale, its departing owners employed Maura Mackey Design to ‘home-stage’ and update their look, and she worked gently with their own possessions and tweaked other things while much of the artwork is from Portugal, especially the large paintings, were done by the man of the house’s dad.

Cohalan Downing describe the interior as being done with “a meticulous theme and superior quality finishes, grand yet intimate spaces and an internationally influenced layout”. Outside, the gardens behind electric access gates of c 0.4 of an acre are as meticulous, with cobble drive and steps to the front door, while the drive also sweeps around to the back to reveal the integrated double garage, about 20’ by 20,’ with roller doors.

Behind, once they roll up, revealed is a fully-fitted workshop with, quite unusually, a full professional car lift for engine motor removal, chassis access and rebuilding, welding and cars here from the Alfa Romeo marque have also been sprayed here after full bodywork, in typical greens and bold reds, such as seen on the current project in hand.

Alfa Romeos of the 1970s had "a short, but gay, life...." 

Pictured here (again!!) is a covetable decades’ old Alfetta GTV, now rust-free. It came from the Italian stable which along with AlfaSud of the 1970s in Ireland prompted this journalist’s father, Tom Barker, as the then-Cork Examiner’s Motoring Correspondent to observe of Alfa’s certainty to rust that their beautiful cars had “a short, but gay life”.

VERDICT:  Likely to surpass its asking price, No 8 is a cracking good contemporary home, open and airy, with its garage open to many other uses, from gym to games room, but may well prove a clincher to a car afficionado, or collector ... if we may mention the garage?