€595k black beauty with coastal setting and woodland West Cork wow factor

Called after a bawdy ballad, the super-stylish Black Hare is worth chasing down

Fri, 28 Jan, 2022 - 00:05

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures Niamh Whitty

Bantry Bay, West Cork
€595,000
Size	198 sq m (2,140 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	5
BER	C1

ONLY for a very short moment, does there seem to be a disconnect between this house, quirkily called The Black Hare, and its greened-in setting, close to an orange-barked grove of myrtle trees.

Then, you realise each is quite the thing of aesthetic beauty, where the black-hued bungalow melds into the 40 shades of green, with its orange order peculiarity beyond.

Grove of orange-barked Chilean Myrtle trees is a sight to behold

Whimsically called after a bawdy old folk song or ballad, the Bonny Black Hare (a version was recorded by Fairport Convention 50 years ago,) The Black Hare is a 2,100 sq ft+ five-bed, five en suite home with a definite bounce and bound in its step after a very recent and thorough upgrade. That both freshened and brightened up its interiors whilst, paradoxically going ‘to the dark side’ in some colour choices, plus there’s a sleek, calm contemporary interior design stamp with mid-20th Century furnishing flair.

And, it’s just up for sale, as an early, and unexpected, 2022 market arrival, listed with Olivia Hanafin of Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill in Skibbereen with a €595,000 AMV, and that’s for an all en suite, five-bed home, in a glorious setting. It’s to any new owner/buyer’s advantage that it comes for sale so soon after being taken creativity in hand and made over, as its owners are now due back in Dublin: they’ve just got the rare chance to build, from scratch, on a family plot, and already have a designer, Ryan W Kennihan Architects, on the case for them in the capital.

The house where they have just cut their teeth and show their interior design chops, The Black Hare, impresses as distinctively different, comfortably accommodating, and in true walk-in condition, perfect as a private family home, or well able to earn its keep in the accommodation sector after its first brief flurry taking guests in 2021, working part-time as a B&B via booking.com.

We’re looking at, and talking about, a setting within the gem that is the Ardnagashel Estate and Arboretum, just west of Bantry in West Cork, out the main coastal route the N71, along a scenic stretch of the Wild Atlantic Way, past Ballylickey, heading toward Glengarriff, getting all the more more beautiful as it goes.

Double aspect living room with Charnwood wood-burning stove and woodland views

The wooded Ardnagashel Estate and arboretum runs down to the sea and waters of Bantry Bay, dating several centuries, to the very early 1800s when it was acquired by an Arthur Hutchins and family from nearby Ballylickey House: one individual member, Ellen Hutchins is particularly associated with the area and its flora.

Hare's breadth: One of several entrances to the Ardnagashel Estate, right by the Black Hare

A noted early pioneer in the field of Irish botany, and not just because of her gender, Ellen Hutchins had a youthful passion for exploring the indented shoreline on her doorstep, rapidly learning about and unearthing vast ranges of plant species, from lichens to seaweeds, discovering and documenting a number never before noted or studied, corresponding with botanists on far-flung shores, literally and metaphorically. Of late, her name and reputation have reemerged as a late rebloomer, with books, short films and even festivals in her honor, many centered around Bantry, Ballylickey and Ardnagashel.

Ellen Hutchins died aged just 29 (1785 to 1815), but her siblings and family put down long roots here at Ardnagashel, planting widely and wisely over decades, bringing and receiving rare specimens from the rounded corners of the globe.

There are examples, many rare, from the Himalayas to the Southern Hemisphere, from Tibet to Tasmania and many points in between, with lots of donations from Kew Gardens in London also in the midst, benefiting from a sheltered orientation, and a sea-level setting by the warming waters of the Gulf Stream.

The Black Hare is set by mature woodland, and visitors include deer, stags and red squirrel

By 1945, Ardnagashel came into a second wind of diligent ownership and specialist planting, when taken on by adventurer and explorer Ronald Kaulback, for another 30 years, adding to the mix of what’s still seen as a fine collection of specimen and champion trees, exotics and natives.

Most admired is likely to be the groves of Chilean and Mediterranean myrtles (pic, left), a sort of spectral stand, notable in this case for their peeling orange tree bark and delicate white flowers, growing with abandon a few minutes’ walk down an unpaved estate road within Ardnagashel from The Black Hare.

There’s only a small number of private houses within the estate, plus a cluster of rental holiday lets at a distance, all framed and pinpointed by some of the arboretum’s specimen examples of girth and height, including firs. Several are down by the water’s edge, and individual house owners in the grounds here (including the owners of the Black Hare) have right-of-way access to the shoreline for year-round bathing, boating and/or seaweed study. Seaweed baths, anyone?

It was just this setting that swayed the pandemic times lifestyle relocation plans of artist, printmaker and lithographer Mick Timmins (see www.independenteditions.com) and his wife Siobhán Corcoran, who works extensively in the international/IT recruitment sector.

Bright new kitchen with overhead Velux and polished concrete effect floor tiles

Both were Dublin-based, but wanted to try something and someplace different. Along with their rescue dog, nine-year old Louis, they came south on a Munster house hunt back in 2020, yet not being too familiar with the Bantry area in particular. Mick recalls some of the last times he was hereabouts was the summer he left school, decades ago......

They spotted a white, 1990-built bungalow called Ardnagashel Lodge, set in mature grounds of 1.5 acres just inside one of the original entrances to the Ardnagashel Estate, past a mid 19th century stone arch that still stands, just off the N71 passing blithely by.

It had been home from day-one to a woman who was selling up to move closer to services and Bantry town, and they leaped at the chance to put their own artistic and creative stamp on it.

Which they very much have done, turning a standard white dormer to a black one on the outside, and updated contemporary recreation on the inside, with a mid 20th design twist, amid lots of upgrades.

The Price Register shows Ardnagashel Lodge selling for €340,000 only as recently as September 2020, and after they got their hands on it, they set about updating, making it completely their own, while working gently with the grounds immediately surrounding it and heading into the woods, where native dwellers include red squirrel and wild deer.

Even though the existing home had only been 30 years old, it needed some modernisation and renewal. Which it got, in spades, over a three-month, frenetic period during pandemic times and which ran up to a lockdown on construction site activity in early 2021: the couple had to move out of their new-buy for just one month of that when services were disconnected or the work just got too messy.

They upgraded insulation, pumped the cavities in the block walls of this already good-size dormer, and tackled improvement across many other fronts.

All windows were replaced with A-rated double glazing, in black frames with simple profiles, using local Bantry area firm BlueLite Windows, based in Kealkil, and BlueLite also helped to source the black property’s very distinctive energy-efficient new front door, a country-style half door, in a vivid Saffron Yellow colour (Siobhán quips that if she was going to live in the country she definitely was going to have a rustic half-door, and there’s no missing the fact she got her wish here.)

Sun room with glazing by BlueLite Windows

They praise the diligence and demeanor of their builder Jimmy Harrington and his crew, and while it hasn’t been extended size-wise, it’s quite a different home inside, virtually all-new, in fact.

Apart from windows, with replacement ones often different shapes and deeper, in many cases dropping now down to floor levels for even better garden-view framing, and insulation, they also replaced the central heating with a new oil condenser boiler, and pretty much all of the radiators inside, from tall versions to cast iron ones, others are like organ pipes, most are, surprise, surprise, black. They sourced from the likes of bestheating.ie and Donegal-based and online firm the Radiator Shop who they say were “brilliant”. The added roof lights, Veluxes, for additional light in other spots too, over the refitted kitchen sink, and over the entry hall/stairwell, by simply going up into the sloping, dormer roof space with the knowing guidance of builder Jimmy Harrington.

Flooring is all-new, either hardwood or tiles, with a mustard coloured carpet on a reordered and black-painted stairs, again adapted at its lower treads by the builders after they took down an unnecessary partition wall between the porch and hall.

All five bathrooms/en suites got taken back to basics, enlarged in one or two cases just by the expedient of going deeper into the dormer eaves; sanitary ware is from the Ideal Standard range and all tiling came from Bantry Bath and Tile, with identical tiling used in each of the five for simplicity and continuity of look: each bathroom has electric underfloor heating.

The kitchen, with contrasting units in wood-look and a dark green slick veneer, came from Express Kitchens, and there’s a Franke tap that churns out boiling water, already an indispensable

‘hot’ adjunct to any kitchen, the users here vouch.

They got a polished concrete kitchen floor effect thanks to a luckily-sourced large tile that replicates the finish, and they crafted their own open shelving for display and cookery books by simply getting a long length of oak kitchen worktops they liked, and cutting along the length in the middle for a nice and useful depth.

Elsewhere, they set up more shelving for books and artifacts, such as in the main bedroom at the house’s far end to the living section, by using long lengths of pine, finished window boards with rounded profiles.

Most internal doors were replaced and upgraded, many painted black and door ironmongery is good, and also tackled was replacing electrical sockets and switches, adding to the number in a mix, some black, some chrome, others nickel, and now beds all have lamps and sockets beside them, after lots of wall-chasing for new ducts.

Moving in, they brought a mix of their own existing furniture, and also shopped locally, nationally and online for suitable pieces. Beds and bed heads came from the likes of Bo Concept, Michael Murphy Furniture, and Pod Furniture, in St Patrick’s Mills in Cork city’s Douglas, others they adapted, such as redoing one bedhead in an oatmeal Donegal tweed.

They stayed engaged across the rest of the interior palette, too, doing the walls, doors and and joinery painting, throughout, using pale colours like Little Green’s ‘Slaked Lime’ on many walls as a neutral backdrop for art, print, photography and lithography display.

Other colours include Farrow & Ball’s ‘Setting Plaster in the main, ground floor bedroom, and then it goes way bolder, to the dark side, with both walls and ceiling in another ground floor bedroom, done in a dark teal colour called ‘Tea with Florence’ by Little Green.

A study room, with garden access, meanwhile, is painted entirely in black, walls and ceilings and the colour is called Dressage, from the Colourtrend range.

While they did all of the interior painting work themselves, they brought in others to paint the black Dressage colour on the smooth external render, where there’s rather a lot of it, including chimneys to match the black roof slates. At that stage, in any case, they were working against the clock, and more than probably fed up to the back teeth with paints, brushes and rollers…

On a brighter note, lighting is another standout selection, sourced in the main from Dublin’s Hicken Lighting and Interiors, by the ancient Brazen Head pub, near the city quays, with others from a UK company called HouseOf.com: there are many great buys and choices throughout, most going with the house sale.

The couple got planning secured for a three-roomed additional chalet in the grounds, for home-office/studio/guest use, and add that they’d have loved to put a hot-tub, and/or a sauna in wooded sections also for full immersion in the tranquillity, but the city beckons now, and they have the excitement of building anew.

Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill’s Olivia Hanafin says the Black Hare “is a stunning example of classic design with modern and contemporary upgrades throughout, set in the unique coastal woodlands of the historic Ardnagashel Estate between Bantry and Glengarriff.”

The Bantry Bay shoreline is a short walk away through woodland

Its vendors had opened for B&B use during 2021 (having the five bedrooms well-spaced out in the layout is bonus, no two are side by side), getting only five-star reviews, with guests from the US, UK, all over Europe and Ireland. Apart from the cooking and hospitality, they had raved about the house, the decor, the comforts, woodland setting and wider location in a coastal area heaving with beauty and botanic finds.

Now, a home-hunter from near or far might swoop in to get the ready-made chance to call this home, too.

VERDICT: Like the look? Make an offer on the art and furniture also....