Feather your nest at Blackrock's Oriole Cottage for €825k
Timbered facade of Oriole Cottage, Menloe Gardens Blackrock Cork
Menloe Gardens, Blackrock Road, Cork
€825,000
Size: 150 sq m (1,615 sq ft)
Bedrooms: 5
Bathrooms: 2
BER: D1
Coming into summer 2021, after a ten-year gap, Cork’s Oriole is back — but it’s a rare species of a house in a niche suburban habitat, and not an example of the migratory bird with which it shares its name.
This one-off home winsomely-named Oriole Cottage, and with Tudor-style timbers across its front facade, nestles deep inside Menloe Gardens off the city’s Blackrock Road within a short flight of Blackrock village, the pier, and the waters of the Lee.
It was last on the market in 2011, and back in that market nadir, it had carried a price guide of €695,000. The Price Register only shows it selling in May of the following year, ’12, for a far lower €505,000, when it was bought by a professional couple.
After their purchase, work took them out of Cork and it hasn’t been lived in for quite a lengthy period. And, while the estate agents back in 2011 had said it was good enough to move into and to tweak, now, in 2021, its selling agent says it needs a full overhaul.
The €825,000 AMV this time around is reflective of a well-recovered, if not overly buoyant, Irish property market due to chronic undersupply, and Blackrock’s reinstated status as one of Cork’s ‘absolute premier addresses', with Menloe Gardens “always regarded as one of Cork’s most prestigious and charming residential developments".
So says auctioneer Dennis Guerin Of Frank V Murphy & Co who’s had quite a few sales here of these early-1900s homes down the years, including one called Bruaidhnabarra, which he sold in 2011 for €730,000 and which, even at that sum (the site was huge), was knocked and replaced.
Since then, there were four or five more Menloe Gardens resales around or over the €750,000 mark, and one, a latter-day build called Kinglsey, sold for €1.24m in 2019, while the latest is Moselle, surfacing on the Price Register two months ago at €860,000.
The majority of Menloe Gardens’ houses range around a large public green, currently graced by very mature flowering chestnut trees, and there’s a mix of detached and semi-detached homes. None of them were ever very large when first built in the 1920s and 1930s but now many are much enlarged after changing hands in the last two decades. Several have been demolished and replaced and, as a result, some of the best of them would now be valued in the €1m+ bracket.
When Oriole Cottage sells now, a total budget for purchase, renovations and extension might head into this sort of price territory too, and Blackrock’s cachet and sheen shows no signs of dipping: Quite the opposite, in fact — if certain other commentators (such as the possibly fictitious Reggie, Captain of Cork Industry and Ask Audrey column fame) are to be believed.
At present, west-facing Oriole Cottage is a detached four/five-bed with two of the five singles in size, and one is described now as a possible home office.
There’s one upstairs, main family bathroom serving the five, and there’s a ground-floor guest WC, two reception rooms, and kitchen/dining room, partly opening into a section with a glass roof sloping up to a 10’ height.
The previous owners came here in the 1970s from West Cork (one was an ornithologist, hence the name Oriole Cottage), and work was done then, and again in the 1990s, and now it’s poised for possibly something far more radical.
The property has an attached garage, outhouse/tool shed, 75’ deep back garden, brick BBQ and crazy-paved patio, with off-street parking and mature planting.
: Time to migrate to Menloe Gardens for a well-feathered nest
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