€1.295m modern Douglas mansion bookended by an attic gym and a basement wine cellar

Over a dozen very large one-off homes were built in Celtic Tiger times in the grounds of the 300-year old Maryborough House, which is now an hotel

Sat, 30 Oct, 2021 - 09:14

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports

Maryborough Orchard, Maryborough Hill, Douglas, Cork
€1.295m
Size	419 sq m (4,500 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	4
BER	c3

EXPENSE wasn’t really a concern when Carrigfoyle (and many of its well-heeled neighbours) was built back in 2004, near the peak time of the Celtic Tiger — it’s a big house, loaded with extras, over many levels and, indeed, loaded over split levels, from wine cellar basement to top floor, attic level gym.

That gym/games room which is next to a mezzanine home office surveying this family home’s palatial main bedroom suite alone is a weighty 850 sq ft — that’s about the size of a good two-bed apartment which, of course, has this whole ‘other ‘house built under, in a plush supporting role.

There's an 850 sq ft attic level gym, the size of a good two-bed apartment

It crowns a home that is 4,400 sq ft in total, and, perhaps the gym is a necessity, as the basement’s dedicated wine cellar is capable of holding 4,500 bottles of wine.

Cause and effect,

Basement wine cellar can hold 4,400 bottles

anyone?

And, the two levels in between? Well there’s a lot of house, five bedrooms and luxury taken for granted, and it’s all now up for sale, with a €1.295 million AMV pinned to it by estate agent Glenn O’Connor of DNG Creedon who’s landed one of the coup Douglas house sales of 2021.

Given an almost instant reaction since he posed a slight description just prior to the Bank Holiday weekend on Facebook, with a teaser drone image also posted on sales boards on Maryborough Hill, he’s fairly confident of a strong sale. It may even hit or top c €1.5m, Mr O’Connor reckons.

Luxury’s not just taken for granted — or for granite — it’s even signalled, such as in a large family bathroom with its extensive tiling said to be by Versace and imported from Italy. In fact, you don’t have to take the selling agent’s word for it: the name Versace is checked at least twice in small tiles on the bathroom’s walls.

Does exactly what it says on the ....tiles

Given the expensive finishes, the costly fireplaces, the heavy oak home bar sourced from Kilkea Castle in Kildare, internal wall curves and the like, much of Carrigfoyle wouldn’t look out of place in Beverly Hills, or, given the wine connection, in Falcon Crest, that 1980s and ‘90s TV family drama sitcom set in a California winery.

But, we’re not in the Napa Valley here, no siree, we’re in Douglas, Cork, in the grounds of a house with a 300-year legacy.

Built about 17 years ago in part of the former orchard grounds of Maryborough House (which itself dates to 1730, now an hotel,) Carrigfoyle is a Tiger Times Irish one-off, freshly up for sale for trade-down owners, who had it designed and built to their spec. It’s one of about 15 one-offs in the gated enclave called Maryborough Orchard, where most of them have their own, secondary electric gate access, in a sort of ‘belt and braces’ approach to security.

The real deal: Maryborough House (Hotel) dates to 1730. Picture: Denis Scannell

Carrigfoyle, which also carries the address 13 Maryborough Orchard, is one of only a small handful of the 15 to as-yet come up for resale. Among the handful to have sold in the past decade, the most recent was No 15, showing on the Price Register at €1.294m, and others have changd hands at prices from €950,000 to €1.5m.

Most are on sites of a quarter of an acre, which are relatively small for the size of the properties built on them. No 15, with its distinctive lantern roof and which featured here over a year ago, was on a slightly larger site of 0.3 of an acre by the main electric access gates to Maryborough Orchard, nearest the luxury hotel. Their sites were sold in the early 2000s by Maryborough House’s owner and hotel developer, Dan O’Sullivan at reported prices from €250,000 to €400,000 per site.

None of the homes built here in Maryborough Orchard was ever small: think 3,500 sq ft to over 5,000 sq ft, and one house, home to the head of a major pharma giant and almost certainly the largest within, is on a double plot.

With No 15 sold, and No 13 next in its footsteps and also being sold as a trading down time move, according to estate agent Glenn O’Connor of DNG Creedon, might one or two more come along in the next few years? It seems the cycle of trade-up/trade-down has started to arrive, even at a place as ‘new’ as here.

All of the houses in the Orchard are set behind high rendered walls, now with mature landscaping screening them even further, one from another: the maturity has the paradoxical effect of making the sites seem larger when these big houses were first built.

Planning and sales conditions at the time dictated some homogeneity between all the homes to be built, so all have rendered finishes and natural slate roofs, but the interpretations then varied quite widely, with about the only other common denominator being size: big, big, big.

Many were done to a period home template, sort of Victorian Lindville looks only writ larger in the main, and behind the design and construction here at No 13 were Bandon-based architect, Pat Cullinane, with builder Tadhg O’Riordan, from Kilnamartra.

It’s clearly a robust, block build with Ducon slab concrete floors, with a feature balcony/terrace on the front elevation, reached off the main bedroom suite, one of five first floor double bedrooms, with two of them en suite, and ceiling heights at first floor level are 10’, and tip 11’ at ground level, with some double height spaces in several sections.

Upwardly mobile: main bedroom suite has a mezzanine reached via spiral stairs, with the 850 sq ft gym behind it

The main bedroom would sort of qualify as a presidential suite in many a hotel, with lofty/double height ceiling, double aspect, dressing room and large private bathroom. A spiral stairs leads to a mezzanine home office, set up with a desk and off the mezzanine is the bulked-up home gym/games room, with a dormer and Velux windows on several sloping ceilings making the 850 sq ft space nice and bright.

Open tread stairs is done in African bubinga wood

The main staircase linking the upper levels to the ground floor is an open, bespoke feature one, with treads in attractively grained bubinga wood from Malawi in Africa, with gilt/gold coloured wrought stair spindles here, and in the split-level section from the hall to the dining room, with the wrought iron work credited to Willoughby’s

steel works in Lismore: the corner/return on the stairs is especially well crafted in that unusual bubinga wood.

Tiered rear garden faces south and steps up into steep woodland below Maryborough Hill and Elden

There’s some even more important steel work here too: some 30 tonnes of steel has gone into a retaining wall and steel steps leading towards the back of No 13’s site, which steps up into mature woods. There’s a bit of extra ground up here on this elevated section which could be colonised and tamed, with an example of what could be done in some neighbouring gardens into the woods, which are part of the original Maryborough House estate, with the Elden apartments above, off Maryborough Hill, but out of sight of the back of No 13.

Carrigfoyle is north facing, south to the back, but it’s likely the proximity, height and angle of the wooded slope behind cuts down on direct sunlight in winter on some of the houses along this side of Maryborough Orchard. The rear here is paved in sandstone, with several access points, including from the main formal, walnut-floored drawing room, via French doors, and the corner bar (from Kildare’s Kilkea Castle) in this room is an optional extra for the house’s new occupants … as might be the stuffed and antlered chamois deer’s head over the door, a goat/antelope variety from Switzerland.

Several rooms, such as the drawing room and dining room (also walnut floored), have gas-fired insert fires: the various chimneypieces were in the €10k-€12k price bracket when installed, say DNG, indicating again the ‘no expense spared’ philosophy.

The rear section of No 13 is stepped up from the front and hall, with short runs of steps to the dining room from the hall, and, again, to the side up to the kitchen which links in turn back to the dining room, with its red painted walls for more dramatic evening meal times. Ceiling height in the kitchen and the dining room, is a bit less than the generous 11’ in the other section of the ground floor.

The kitchen, set in the back/south-west corner, has painted beech units, with quartz/granite tops, has an Aga which is such a part of the ‘hearth of the home’ that it’s included in the sale (some Aga owners get so attached to them they want to take these beasts with them when they move), and the kitchen/diner’s far end opens up into an extra height section, adding further to No 13’s ‘cubic capacity’ as well as its generous floor area.

Internal doors are in Spanish oak, bathrooms are Victorian in character, and the windows (all with made to measure curtains and drapes) and external doors are also period house in character and proportion, done sliding sash style with lead weights, sourced from Mellott’s Joinery in Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, a fifth generation family firm, trading since the 1850s and able to produce A-rated timber sash windows.

Investment in windows and doors at Carrigfoyle was a cool €150,000 back in the day ... did we mention ‘no expense spared?!’

VERDICT:

It’s now a decade since the slow, inch-back from ‘the crash’ took hold, but it’s likely current day market values of high-end homes like this are still well under what it costs to build to this level.

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