Builder’s Rochestown €1.5m home with pioneering 'extras' good as his Bond

Drone image of7,800 sq ft Anglesea House, Rochestown, with swimming pool complex on right. Agent Patricia Stokes guides the pioneering 1970s timber frame build on 1.5 acre at €1.5 m
Rochestown, Cork |
|
---|---|
€1.5 million |
|
Size |
734 sq m (7,880 sq ft) |
Bedrooms |
5 |
Bathrooms |
4 + pools., changing rooms |
BER |
C2 |
THERE’S a guarantee that the large, family-friendly Anglesea House is a rock-solid build — it has been the private home of the noted, retired Cork house builder Noel Parkes and his wife Geraldine for almost half a century.

This Rochestown hill-set house was pioneering back when first built as an early exemplar of energy-efficient timber-frame construction.

Remarkably, for a home of its mid-1970s vintage, it comes for sale with estate agent Patricia Stokes, with an impressive C2 BER — the equivalent of a spritely spring in its step, for its new owners.

It comes available in the very weeks when many Irish family homes are hosting First Communions and Confirmations in their gardens and patios: well, this house, with its builders’ ‘extras’ — such as a swimming pool and a sliding, retractable bar — can go a few steps further than more modest private dwellings in terms of happily hosting very major celebrations.

Anglesea House has managed to hold not one, but two weddings — giving a proper send-off to one son, and a daughter, who grew up at this party-friendly, family-centered property.

Here, though, instead of being out in a garden shed or proudly-titled shebeen, it’s more of an occasional speakeasy, as it’s a secret one, which can be securely hidden away at a moment’s notice.

This home’s locked-away yet revealing bar was deliberately designed this way, Noel and Geraldine Parkes chuckle, to keep temptation away from daring teenagers and their friends in earlier days when they had free run of the super-sized house, the stocked kitchen, the gardens, the lower ground floor games/snooker room, and the hugely popular pool, with motorised opening roof,

The house gets its name from Cork’s Anglesea Place near City Hall where Noel grew up.

Ahead of the curve Anglesea House is set on the upward slope of Coach Hill in Cork’s Rochestown, looking out over the waters of Cork harbour and Lough Mahon from its elevated perch.

She adds that it “has its own distinctive sense of place, and its seclusion and privacy is balanced with the benefits of neighbours and nearby amenities.”

Favours got returned too. Some of the family are now also in the construction business, and one carpenter son hand-built the kitchen units for his folks, having seen a high-end example in an interiors magazine.