Upside down Oz beach house with a Cork twist, and a €925k price tag
Nirvana, an upside down from Down Under at Myrtleville, Co Cork is on the market for €925,000. Pictures John Roche
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Myrtleville, Co Cork |
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€925,000 |
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Size |
242 sq m |
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Bedrooms |
4 |
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Bathrooms |
3 |
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BER |
A2 |
The Irish/Australian couple relocated to Cork from their careers and time working in the health sector in Saudia Arabia, getting family support at the time from both sides of the antipodes, with a very young family of three, including twin girls.
The Irish half of the family has Galway roots, so ‘she’ won the relocation toss when it came to moving to the Irish coastline.
Perhaps ‘his’ consolation compromise was being able to build the couple’s new, Irish family home in an Australian beach house fashion?
If so, that’s entirely appropriate as it turns out, because the home they created together and finished in 2017 has strong hints of Aussie ‘Grand Design’ yet looks right at home in its Myrtleville, south Cork perch, overlooking as it does expansive ocean, the super-popular sandy beach below in the green folds around Pine Lodge and Bunnconellan restaurant/bar, as well as Power Head off to the east across Cork harbour’s mouth, and is book-ended by Ringabella to the west.
In between, and at all stages of the tides and day and night, the picture below is of passing yachts, trawlers, naval vessels, tankers, and cargo ships.
In fact, the panorama beneath spans the might of enormous cruisers, down to the minute, to surfboard riding over the reef waves by Fennels Bay.
That reef, glimpsed from Nirvana, gives its best rides in winter in a southerly swell, and an offshore breeze, but hardly compares to what the couple could have had if the coin-toss had relocated them to Oz.
The Aussie man of this house say they based their design here on a beach house in a spot in Western Australia where he spent his own more youthful holidays, a place close enough to Perth (ie an hour or two’s drive) called Yallingup, popular with surfers and beach-goers, sort to Myrtleville on steroids ….or force-fed on sunshine and Vegemite?
Having completed this build, on an already settled and mature site a few years ago, the family are now about to move just a hop and a skip over the headland, preprint got move to Crosshaven town, and as a result, Nirvana is on offer with agents Sheila O’Flynn and Ann O’Mahony Sherry FitzGerald, who guide the detached, upside-down 2,600 sq ft four-bed home at €925,000.
That €925k mark is the equivalent of Aus$1.5 million, for the same of price comparisons on either side of the Equator, with the median price of Yallingup Australia homes put at Aus$2.3m by online searches. Those same searches also note a 30% increase in values locally there during the past year of global pandemic property panic — even higher than Cork/West Cork’s coastal house price surges in the same time period.
At Cork’s Nirvana €925,000 AMV, close to but well under the €1m mark, it’s the second quite high-end contemporary design with clear sea views to come to the south Cork seaside market in recent weeks.
It follows the launch of another upside-down home, Med Jez, on the Coast Road between Myrtleville and Fountainstown, featuring here a month ago with a €1.8m price tag, for a four-bed with land dropping down to the sea.
Indicative of the level of current demand at the Cork market’s upper end for ‘safe retreats’ and family boltholes during a period of uncertainty, Sherry FitzGerald has seen the sale complete recently of a 7,000 sq ft contemporary home, on two acres above Carrigaline called Ngong, for its October 2020 AMV of €1.75m. Ngong's buyer did his bidding after virtual viewings, before he ever got to see the property in its actual physical sense and continuing then happy out, to conclude the purchase at the full asking price after inspection when it was sale agreed.
Now, while the air is pretty thin up around Ngong’s €1.75m sale price, there’s going to be a wider possible buying cohort for this home called Nirvana, set a mile or so from the beach above Myrtleville, near the rugby club and close to Templebreedy and Ballinluska townlands.
Carrying a Fennel’s Bay address, it’s reached down along a slender cul de sac road by the T-junction which leads to Crosshaven village and/or to Fennels Bay, sharing the land with a handful of other one-off homes with similar views, giver or take and at least one other contemporary new build down this way is by an Australian family: the lure of the sea, and all that?
This was built on the grounds of an older, early 1900s home called Nirvana which the couple bought, initially with the intention to renovate and upgrade, but in the heel of the hunt, it proved too difficult to get what they wanted, so they knocked and rebuilt from scratch.
The design is a mix of what the couple had in their head with a very firm ‘’Aussie beach house’ look in mind, and for a while, they worked with a local architect and then ended up with the final look and layout coming through their builders, Murphy New Homes, who’d been doing an upmarket one-off on the Coast Road to Fountainstown, and who they approached and then drafted in to deliver what’s here today, four years down.
It’s essentially a simple shape, near-square, with a low pitch roof, zinc-clad, and with a 100-year guarantee.
Entry to the uppermost living level is made extra-easy thanks to the presence of a wide and sturdy concrete bridge with ship-like rails to the front door enabled thanks to a sloping ‘cut and fill’ sort of approach to the sloping site’s gradient.
This bridge/gangplank not only works extremely effectively, allowing for a sort of ’moat’ around the lower level for circular access, but it also gives good shelter/storage/drying space under the bridge, used sometimes for storing kayaks and surfboards and drying beach gear.
The shape is stepped back, in three stages to the front to allow for a half-wrap around balcony off the upper floor main kitchen/living/dining, deep enough to hold a large dining table and seat upon for al fresco dining, next to the near-obligatory outdoor barbie burner, and Sherry Fitz’s Ann O’Mahony says there is circa 300 sq ft of upper-deck outdoors space to be enjoyed here.
Sliding doors for access and front window are big, full-height, about 2.4m tall and the view is full on to the south, while the step-back in the corner off the kitchen picks up the very last available evening light, the owners note.
It’s not just the light and views that stand out here: there’s also the sound of the sea and shipping, depending on the wind, and the house’s young inhabitants are often charmed when larger cruise ships are at anchor off the shoreline and they can see and even hear Disney movies being projected on huge on-board ship screen.
In some ways, it’s a neat reprise of stories that the ‘old’ Nirvana’s owner had told them of the sounds of live jazz music being played loudly on board and wafting over the waves to be enjoyed by landlubbers on this stretch of cliff and shoreline? Hmm, wonder if the music on the Titanic when it visited Cork/Queenstown and anchored at the harbour mouth was similarly heard on its doomed maiden voyage in April 1912? And, the band played on….?
The first/living level floor is effectively quadruple aspect, with a mix of window placements and sizing for light, yet privacy is maintained, and the overall build gets fantastic A2 BER, with a wood-burning stove as both a visual uplift once the sun goes down and as a secondary, but barely needed, heat source and as the focal hearth of the home with windows either side.
Flooring at this main level is engineered timber, and apart from a walk-thru hall/cloak section for immediate shedding of coats and shoe (which you’d barely notice on first arrival as your eye is immediately drawn to the sea views beyond), there’s also a guest WC on this upper floor, as well as a shelved pantry off the galley style kitchen, with a long run of units plus island with pendant lights above.
A flight of oak stairs leads to the ground level, which is home to four bedrooms, as well as a large family room/playroom with side garden access, main bathroom with stand-alone bath and a utility room/laundry, with rear access under the wide ‘gangplank’ bridge above.
Unlike Med Jez further along the coast to the west, which notably has just one access door in total, Nirvana has lots of indoor/outdoor access points, four, plus three points of access to the front and corner balcony.
One of those access points is a set of double doors to a patio from the main bedroom, which has a walk-in robe and en suite with a big wet-room style shower with rainfall-style head.
This coastal property’s overall condition is very, very good, given it has only been lived in for about four years, while its grounds give a far older feel, thanks to maturity and planting gratis of previous owners.
The site’s about 0.4 of an acre, with old stone walls and entrance pillars, stepped and tiered and with some very old apples trees in an orchard section looking slightly hunched down given the exposure to the sea, but hardy nonetheless.
The immediate view includes the back and roofs of some neighbouring homes, the natural slope of the land means everyone gets a view without obstructing anyone else’s, and even though it’s hundreds of metres back from the actual shoreline, the occupants reckon there are more engaging near, middle and far views as compensation, rather than just an expanse of water… of which there is oceans abounding.
VERDICT: A right-at-home upside-down house that came from The Land Down Under.
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