€600,000 Cork harbour home has links to first steamship to cross the Atlantic

What a difference three years makes - but owners of superbly restored period home put in 60-hour weeks on their home/work over several years

Sun, 22 Aug, 2021 - 21:06

Tommy Barker Property Editor

Glenbrook, Cork Harbour
€600,000
Size	230 sq m (2,460 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	Pending

THIS Cork villa home called Simla has only known two family owners in the past century — and, even though the current owners have only been here for a mere three of those 100 years, they’ve made as indelible a mark on the period property as previous occupants, setting it up for decades more of rude, good health to come.

One of two formal reception rooms at Simla, Glenbrook, with hand-crafted bookshelves

The Irish/American couple, with teenage son, were the perfect buyers for Simla when they bought it in 2018: they have professional backgrounds in architecture, industrial design and construction, as well as having an utterly practical, hands-on ability to roll up their sleeves and to get stuck in.

Sash windows all conserved and drum-tight at Simla

They now know every square centimetre of their fully-conserved home, and are only leaving with very mixed feelings.

When Ohio, US-born Luke Mandle and Dublin native Lorna Ross bought Simla, it had been four generations in the ownership of the Roberts family, since 1919: like the Glenbrook area itself, the Roberts surname is synonymous with the harbour, the sea, and the broad Atlantic ocean.

Ship-shape and bone dry: bathroom with wetroom area where there's a rainfall shower over a restored cast iron roll top bath

An ancestor of the previous owner Susan Roberts was Richard Roberts, the Passage West-born captain of the SS Sirius, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, going from Cork to New York in 18 days back in 1838, a year after the vessel was built in Scotland.

Capt. Richard Roberts, captain of the Sirius, which made the first steam powered crossing of the Atlantic in 1838

With a figurehead of a dog, to mark the ship’s naming after Sirius the Dog Star, the brightest star in the sky, the history-making 178-foot ship later plyed more pedestrian routes and eventually sunk off the Cork coast at Ballycotton, while carrying passengers and cargo from Glasgow to Cork via Dublin, with the loss of 20 lives.

Passage West Maritime Heritage & Museum Centre has a scale model of the ship 'Sirius', the first ship to cross the Atlantic entirely under steam, and captained by Passage West man Richard Roberts.

Today, it is still fondly remembered in Cork, and even though post-Simla’s sale some of the Roberts family’s Sirius memorabilia (such as a sea captain’s coffer chest) went to auction in 2018, the owners of Simla have an empathy for that Roberts’ nautical link.

Simla's subtle tribute to the SS Sirius, named after the Dog Star, and to the house's previous owners the Roberts family, descendants of Sirius' Captain Richard Roberts. It was 3D printed by Luke Mandle

They have a ship painting on a reception room wall, very similar to the Sirius, and, in a more lateral thinking connection, the multi-talented Luke Mandle even 3-D printed small Labrador dog’s heads to crown columns at the property’s entrance support wrought iron gates (pic, left) they put in, commemorating the Dog Star, that other Sirius in the sky. (The gates came from a friend, Kilkenny-based artist and conserver Shem Caulfield.)

With their own trans-Atlantic connection, the Mandle/Ross family with their 16-year-old son Oscar bought Simla in 2018 when they relocated from Thomastown, Kilkenny. Now, for family/education reasons they’re set to relocate to Sligo, continuing peripatetic careers from the west coast.

Working at the intersection of technology, science and design, Dún Laoghaire-born Lorna Ross returned to Ireland after three decades working at the highest design levels with the likes of MIT, the Mayo Clinic, US defence agency DARPA and Motorola, as well as lecturing in Rhode Island School of Design.

She came home to head up global consulting company Accenture’s Fjord Design Studio in The Dock, Dublin as Design Director, and now after an Irish jobs move is Chief Innovation Officer with VHI.

Lorna’s work will see her switch between Sligo and Dublin, instead of Cork and Dublin, while Luke Mendle’s next challenge is as-yet unclear, as he wraps up a two/three year stint of house renovations, upgrades and super-sensitive conservation of historic building fabric here at Simla.

He restored each and every original sash window by hand, scarfing in new hardwood sections and coping with the nuances and weight impacts of old vs newer 3mm vs 4mm glass, and the panes’ impact on the sashs’ balancing hidden lead weights. He also levelled, insulated and refinished pitch pine floors and in conjunction with certified trades, fully replumbed and rewired.

Luke now describes the circa 170-year-old Simla as “an historic house with hidden, modern engine.”

That hidden modernity includes a pantry/engine room with CAT Six cabling, network patch panel and hub; high-efficiency modulating-condensing boiler, with four zones with wireless thermostats and internet phone app control; an aqua box for pressurised shower and tap water; whole house sedimentary water filtration; a six-stage reverse osmosis drinking water filtration.

Oh, and fret not, everything is labelled for any new, less-engaged owner to take on, all pipes and valves identified and clarified, with easy-peasy filter change instructions — an historic house with hidden modern parts, indeed.

Luke has his own professional-standard workshop in a former back room of this home, where he does carpentry and metalwork and just about every other task to a perfectionist level. His handiwork includes making sleek, fine-finished steel-framed glazed double doors for the kitchen, to match the immaculately restored Crittall-style steel windows in the kitchen’s gable wall.

Qualification here: in case other Irish homeowners (or their partners) are feeling a bit inadequate right now, Luke’s career trajectory saw him start in DIY at age 12, train as a carpenter, cabinet and joinery maker, work in auto repairs and commercial roofing, before going into property development and restoration in San Francisco.

Detached Simla is part of Glenbrook's rich collection of late Georgian and Victorian homes

Oh, and then he did a Masters in Architecture in University of Virginia, under its dean, William McDonough, the global guru of sustainable design. Entirely coincidentally, McDonough also featured online here this week, with an early 1970s example of an eco-aware house at Shanagarry.

Back to black: kitchen is from IKEA, dressed up..

When starting out on their Glenbrook, Cork harbour home renovations at Simla, a steady and painstaking three-year programme done with quiet pride as it turns out, Lorna and Luke outlined the few spatial changes they’d make, taking down perhaps a bit of a wall to integrate a dead space into a bedroom, or making a new access to the kitchen so that it was no longer hidden away behind a back stairs in 19th-century style.

So the improved room flow upstairs has changed a tad, as has the kitchen access below, but the vast bulk of the house is as-was, such as the twin ground floor reception rooms, each with original, now-restored sliding sash windows, and matching, facing white marble chimney-pieces.

Large sliding pocket doors connect/divide rooms, as needs and uses suggest, and Luke made a wall of book shelving, painted a beautiful light shade of blue, which also frames the door to the hall (all original door locks have been rebuilt).

Other rooms at ground level include a back hall, study/breakfast room and workshop/multi-use room, while behind, outdoors, is a private courtyard garden, with lofted old stone garage/boathouse. This is about the only part of the impressive period property still with unrealised potential: guest suite/Airbnb, anyone?

Get Sirius: float your own boat(house) from Cork harbour home Simla

Back inside the robustly healthy Simla, the first floor’s slight reconfiguration now sees four bedrooms, instead of the previous five, with two superb quality, period-appropriate bathrooms, cleverly reworked.

Sinks, for example, sit on repurposed examples of old, crafted antique hardwood furniture such as sideboards, with polyurethane/lacquer finishes making them impervious to water splashes.

A really clever insertion is a large wetroom section, now home to a rainfall shower head, above an immaculate, re-enamelled roll-top cast iron bath.

This whole section is tanked and tiled in dark green tiles, with an almost theatrical set of waterproof curtains to contain splashes: everything has been diligently thought through and then aesthetically delivered upon, with tactile finishes, fabrics framed art, and heated mirrors facing it.

Side/main entrance with lofted stone shed visible behind

Gable and double fronted Simla has its access point to the side, with an original entrance porch with old encaustic floor tiles, while its twin reception rooms run off the hall to the left, for east-facing views over the harbour waters, room after room.

The views are towards Carrigaloe, so there’s always something to see — the road to Cobh, the commuter rail line to and fro, fringing Great Island, and shipping and pleasure craft traffic on the tidal stretch between Monkstown and Lough Mahon, with the city further upriver, and the Atlantic a few miles away past the harbour mouth.

The regular back-and-forth of the Cross River ferry is witnessed day-in, day-out from the heart of this Glenbrook home, and especially from the steel kitchen windows, and the family can time their arrival at the ferry when they want to go to Cobh to the second at this stage, with marine, almost metronomic precision.

Gable window in steel, with secure access beyond to the courtyard

Kitchen window is early C20th steel, Crittall-style, with brass handles, all also conserved and gleaming

There’s been a precision too in the quality of work the couple have done here at Simla. Teenage son Oscar’s input too is pointed out: he’s been working in Luke’s workshop/man caves from an early age too, and gets credit for much of the external painting, with only the front left unpainted as the couple loved the render’s patina of age, and quality is abundantly evident in the joinery, cabinet-making and metal work.

Insulation has gone in under floor and former damp issues have been addressed, with attention to drainage and levels, and the villa’s roof, with its six lead valleys got the once-over, for safety’s sake, but thankfully most of the roof had been in excellent order in any case.

The side entrance/old porch has a slate roof now, in place of the glass that had been there, and this side access courtyard is also home to a reskinned lean-to glasshouse, home to a productive vine with currently ripening grapes: the girth of the vine is such as to suggest that it dates back to early Roberts’ family times here, decades ago, if not almost the full century. The grounds too have plants which go back decades, rooting the home to the spot and the generations of tending occupants.

The original twin-oven Aga in the kitchen has been refurbished, looking right at home with more contemporary black units (from IKEA,looking completely high-end, with now-matching handles, black tiles and black metro tiling): it works, sitting at ease with the upgraded surfaces, plumbing and electrics. The vast bulk of the work was done by themselves: Luke made it a full-time project, so perhaps 60 hours a week went into it, finishing only in recent weeks with a move to Sligo now beckoning.

It’s exemplified by the superb work done on the rebuilt, conserved and rattle-free window sashes (with original, glass slumps and bumps in places) and underfloor insulation, with door saddles looking as if they’ve never budged, but in fact made from old oak and teak leftovers from other works in this home: sustainability, again.

When they needed specialist, certified work done, Lorna and Luke were lucky to find the likes of plumber John Horgan and electrician Karl Herron, both happy to come and go with the flow of work as it progressed, done piecemeal, sort of room to room, bit by bit.

(For family peace during a time of upheaval, son Oscar’s bedrooms was the first to be tackled and finished: his folks made their own temporary bedroom up in one of the bathrooms whilst doing their own!)

Revealing too perhaps just how consuming the project was for them, Luke was in a local dentist’s surgery a few years back when he admired the work done there by the electrician, making contact with Karl Herron as a result. Spotting electrical conduit work while in the dentist’s? That’s either avoidance, or obsession.

Knowing the drill, as it were, the selling agents now for the c 2,500 sq ft Simla are Jackie Cohalan and Malcolm Tyrrell of Cohalan Downing, guiding at €600,000 (it last sold for €425k in 2018, according to the Price Register).

The agents completely appreciate the property period villa’s transformation as they also sold it back in 2018 when it was still lovely, but admittedly needed a deal of work by then.

Jackie Cohalan says all those who looked at it back then were prepared to spend a considerable sum on Simla, but notes “you could sort of predict how it would be done and who’d do the work and the windows and the kitchen and all that.”

But what they didn’t expect would be that it would be a one-man, one-woman, one family delivery, to such a high and respectful level, painstaking, precise and quite simply serene, and beautiful.

Glenbrook, Cork Harbour

€600,000

Size: 230 sq (2,460 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 4

Bathrooms: 3

BER: Pending