If it's good enough for Brando...what's not to like about this €875k waterside home
Picture: VR3D.ie
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Cobh, Co Cork |
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€875,000 |
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Size |
415 sq m (4,500 sq ft) |
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Bedrooms |
6 |
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Bathrooms |
2 |
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BER |
Exempt |
WHAT do Donald Trump, Princess Margaret and John Fitzpatrick have in common? Answer: An interest, at one time or another, in Mount Panther, an historic country house in Co Down.
John grew up there, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon paid a visit to check out its famed ballroom in 1963 and The Donald’s people considered adding it to his collection of golf properties when it went up for sale in 2008.
John’s father Paddy — building contractor, farmer and entrepreneur — bought Mount Panther in 1931 and his 10 children had the run of it, along with circa 150 acres of farm and parkland.
It’s now in a state of disrepair, but John’s nephew, Richard, is working on restoring it.
These intriguing details of John’s childhood are shared at the kitchen table of a subsequent home in Rushbrooke, a handsome Victorian house built using Belvelly redbrick, where he and his wife Marguerite reared their four children, and which they are selling with a guide price of €875,000.
John’s journey from Co Down to Rushbrooke was along a career path that started with Caterpillar in Belfast, then Dublin, then Cork in 1968 as Munster manager. He met Marguerite in 1969 and they married the following year, moving to Johnstown Park in Glounthaune. Although they liked Johnstown Park, they had visions of something bigger — perhaps accustomed to outsized family homes. Marguerite’s mother, Francis, grew up in Audley House, now Bruce College on St Patrick’s Hill, and her grandfather owned Sunview House, now part of Christ the King Secondary School off the South Douglas Road.
John and Marguerite’s plan was a self-build on 3.5 acres, but a call from auctioneer Seán Lynch steered them towards Cobh.
“It was July 1978 and myself and Marguerite were on our way to a weekend wedding in Bantry. Seán called us and said he had a house we should look at in Cobh. While at the wedding, we got another call to say my mother was dying.
“We set out for the North, but got a call on the way to say she had passed.” With the urgency over, they deferred the trip North to Monday and headed instead for Coolgreine in Rushbrooke.
“We were very impressed with the building itself, how big and bright the rooms were, and the fantastic view of the sea.
“But the clincher for me was the fact that it had a boathouse and slipway, as I had a cabin cruiser in a mooring in Aghada,” John says.
Additional boxes ticked included proximity to church and schools, the option of taking the train to Cork City and the nearby Rushbrooke Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
By the following Friday, having buried his mother in the interim, John had shaken hands on the purchase of Coolgreine.
“Over the years, we’ve been very, very happy here. Our youngest child was born here and it’s been a lovely family home. It’s a little bit of heaven down by the water,” John says.
Sonya, their eldest daughter, says an open-door policy always operated at Coolgreine and her father says it was a great party house.
“You could say we are party people. I bought a spit roast to roast a whole pig and the first time we used it was in 2001, where we had a houseful of people during that memorable weekend when the Irish Open was hosted in Fota Island” John says.
“We had about 150 people across the generations and it became an annual event.” Coolgreine was also where John, who inherited his father’s entrepreneurial spirit (another thing in common with The Donald?) invented the Marjon valet (a name inspired by a blend of Marguerite and John), a sort of hi-tech trouser/suit press, which secured him a slot on The Late Late Show back in the day, and which he took as far as production in Whitepoint in 1991. However patent difficulties put paid to it, along with international players entering the market, he says. One still remains in Belvelly House, Cobh, formerly owned by Heineken, where large-scale entertaining took place and which featured in these pages in recent months.
John was also unafraid to think outside the box when devising innovations in his own home, installing a jacuzzi bath when few had them and a sauna on the top floor in Coolgreine, which looks the real deal and which Sonya says still works.
In fact, it was during the fitting of the jacuzzi that the family learned more about the history of their home when they discovered newspapers in the attic, left behind by the builders, dating to the 1880s (even older than Mount Panther, which dates to the 1700s). Some of these newspapers were donated to Cobh Museum, Sonya says, and the remainder were returned to the attic for future generations to enjoy.
Coolgreine, which John says was considered as a billet for Marlon Brando while filming the ill-fated Divine Rapture in Ballycotton in 1995 (“it was on the shortlist of houses for Brando to stay in”) was almost certainly built for the British admiralty, who had a base at nearby Haulbowline Island, says selling agent Michael Daniels, of Michael H Daniels & Co.
As he rightly points out, it occupies a magnificent position on circa 1.5 acres overlooking Cork Harbour and has the good fortune of a southerly aspect, with fine gardens running down to the water’s edge. It’s this direct access to water that made the boathouse possible and Sonya, the only child to be married out of Coolgreine, has fond memories of summer launch parties.
“It was a big adventure, a big day out, sending the boat (a 32’ cabin cruiser) down the slipway and into the tide. We’d go over to Ringabella and drop anchor and swim ashore and meet up with friends.” She loved growing up in Coolgreine and remembers sitting on the window seat of the bay in her bedroom watching the harbour.
Coolgreine has a series of bay windows, including in the front-facing drawing room, where a white marble fireplace transplanted from Mount Panther takes pride of place. Sonya says it can be part of the sale if the buyers commit to leaving it there in perpetuity. Otherwise it will return to Mount Panther as part of the ongoing restoration.
There are two other reception rooms, one of which was used more recently as a home office by Sonya for urparts.com, a company she runs with her brother that connects buyers and sellers of construction equipment online. Having taken over from her father, whose core business (Fitzplant) was buying and selling heavy earth-moving equipment, they re-modelled the business online during the pandemic.
“We started the business at the kitchen table in Coolgreine,” Sonya says.
The third reception room was for dining, which in later years switched to the kitchen. There’s also a utility room and a WC downstairs.
On the first floor, the master bedroom faces south and was once decorated with a stunning 14-piece Japanese furniture set straight from Mount Panther and bought at a London auction house by John’s father. There are three additional bedrooms on this floor and two bathrooms.
There are two more bedrooms on the second floor — one is fitted with that sauna — but they could equally be used as a playroom or home office.
None of the rooms has been decorated for the best part of three decades. Extensive re-decorating/modernising is on the cards for whoever buys this 4500sq ft property, which Sonya says is structurally sound.
It’s essentially a blank canvas, flooded with natural light.
Outside, the secluded gardens have been well maintained, and mature trees and shrubs abound. There’s a lily pond, and a flight of steps to the front lead to a large lawn that slopes down to the coastline. There’s also plenty of lawn to the rear and a grass tennis court. The house is set well back from the public road and approached via a sweeping drive, down an easily missed turn off the main road.
Sonya says the garden is a wildlife haven. “We have a resident heron who lives in the tall trees by the boathouse and drinks from the lily pond. There’s also a fox and dozens of bunnies,” she says.
John and Marguerite moved out of Coolgreine a few years back (“it was too big for two people, we were rattling around in it once the kids were gone”) but remain close by, downsizing to a two-storey home that they added to an existing storehouse inside the property’s boundary wall. John says the previous owner of Coolgreine (Dan Fitzpatrick, no relation, owner of the cross-river ferry, whose brother, Christy, was manager at Irish Steel) installed a big store in the grounds and they converted part of it into a granny flat for his mother-in-law. However, when she passed away John and Marguerite subsequently moved in, even closer to the water than Coolgreine.
John is hopeful Coolgreine’s new owners will be a family that eek as much enjoyment out of living there as he and his crew did.
“It was a lovely, warm welcoming, family home and we would love to see it continue on like that,” he says.
Mr Daniels says interest so far has been both local and from the UK.
“There’s very good interest. It will probably be a family given the size, and someone with an interest in boating and sailing.
“It’s a bit of a rarity to have direct access to the water and a [swing] mooring,” he says.
There’s also potential to convert the boathouse, adds Mr Daniels.
Coolgreine, in the leafy suburb of Rushbrooke, is less than 1km from nearby Rushbrooke train station, 1.5km from Cobh and 23km from Cork City.
Perfect family berth for those keen to drop anchor in a waterside location with their own boathouse and slipway.
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