'Driftwood' from the 1930s turned family home in Fountainstown selling for €625k

1930s beach shack was extended as a family home by a shipwright in the 1990s. Now, its time might be up given the rise in demand for coastal settings, views and sea-swimming on one's doorstep

Sat, 19 Feb, 2022 - 07:09

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports

Coast Road, Fountainstown
€625,000
Size	197 sq m (1,150 sq ft)
Bedrooms	3 (plus loft)
Bathrooms	1
BER	G

You don’t just get the sight of the sea, and the wheeling of the sun from morning to night, at Driftwood — you also get the sound of the sea in waves, from dawn to dusk: overnight, too.

Sunset over Fountaintown beach, a view from Driftwood

Dating to the 1930s, extended and invested in again in the 1990s by a local family with four generations of Fountainstown roots, Driftwood is one of the earlier buildings on the Coast Road, and as a result of having the choice of sites also has the choicest of sights, from sunrises in the morning by Roches Point, scanning the ocean all day and all passing marine and pleasure craft traffic, and then down to the beach at Fountainstown itself, up the creek and over to Ringabella, where the sunsets by evening.

Driftwood dates to the 1930s, later extended

Even when the sun doesn’t shine, the vista’s as fully-engaging: the windier the better, and the bigger the seas. You could never be bored, and little wonder that a pride-of-place spot to the front of Driftwood is given over to a pretty serious telescope, with binoculars around and about too.

The owners of this charming, timber-built beach house know every movement of the weather, and shipping, and even though they are selling after 30 blissful years, they’re hoping not to go too far, and to keep at least a sliver of a a view from the place they have in their sights, moving after family are reared and mostly flown.

They made maximum use of living here, into all-year sea swimming ever before a certain global pandemic made it a chilly commonplace, and they also have surfboards, kayaks, Laser dinghies, and a small boat up Fountainstown’s back beach or creek and sandbank by Ringabella.

The ‘man of the house’ has, indeed, salt in his blood, with generational roots here, and he had trained and worked as a shipwright, later becoming a service engineer for the RNLI and travelling widely, keeping that life-saving service in tune.

He himself built the ‘second half’ of Driftwood in the early 1990s, adding to the original cabin or timber chalet, later reskinning it all in timber cladding, adding an apex window over the loft and building the lofty-ceilinged c 20’ by 14’ main living space, with sheet copper-backed hearth around a wood-burning stove with home office behind also.

They are now selling up, and Driftwood is listed with estate agent Jackie Cohalan of Cohalan Downing, who guides it at €610,000, and she describes the south-facing property on its third-of-an-acre site as “the proverbial holy grail for house hunters”. It’s already winsome, and enviable in its siting. Ms Cohalan describes it as “cute”, while adding that “it needs upgrading and modernisation, but it has the potential to be extraordinary. It is easy to conceive a contemporary refurbishment that revolves around the sunny, uninterrupted seascape and maximises the spacious site.”

When she first visited, Driftwood’s occupants wanted to talk to her about the rooms and the construction, but they ruefully admit “she just stood out on the deck in front, her back to the house, and told us ‘this is what it’s all about’”.

Indeed, the panorama is the money-shot. Might someone pay all that money and then flatten the house? It’s entirely possible, or at the very least they’ll spend further on it, and there’s no doubt just how hot the commutable coastal location over the headland from Crosshaven has become right now.

Ms Cohalan launched an upgraded bungalow called Dursey a kilometre away last month, a bit more inland, but with a distant view: it launched at €595,000, and is now under offer at €670,0000.

Out in the middle of the Coast Road, between here and Myrtleville, a just-built contemporary house called Med Jez has sold (via Savills) for just under its seemingly ambitious €1.8m AMV after almost a year on the market. An A1 BER-rated 2,900 sq ft house with unobstructed views, it replaced an earlier home of the same name sold for €550,000 in 2016.

Med Jez Coast Road Fountainstown: sale agreed

The €1m barrier was also exceeded in the case of another knock and rebuild- home high above Myrtleville called Nirvana: that’s understood to be at an advanced sale stage at c €1.3m, but neither of these strong results have yet made it to the Price Register.

That Price Register shows about 18 €500,000-plus sales in the Myrtleville/Fountainstown area, with most of the strong prices going to places with really good views.

One, the immaculate timber-framed Atlantic House by Poulgorm, which had been part of the 1902/1903 Great Exhibition in Cork City, has sold three times of late; most recently, it fetched €925,000, and was bought back by a previous owner who’d sold it in 2018 for €750,000. Its interim owner had invested in the unique property’s best assets… well, assets second only to its vista.

Now, things look fair set for Driftwood’s sale too, whatever its future holds post-sale.

It’s got three bedrooms, plus loft/attic rooms and pots of rustic charm and forests of timbers inside and outside. Heating is via an Aga in the kitchen or the living room’s stove, and there’s a kitchenette by the dining room with stairs up to the loft, as well as a utility/back porch, main bathroom, and shower room.

The views are from the main entrance porch/hall, and main room left and right, plus from the decking.

The third-of-an-acre sloping site includes a polycarbonate covered rear access, shed, and has a derelict boathouse by the main road, with pedestrian access from the Coast Road and vehicular access from a road up to the back serving a handful of other one-off, detached homes.

Location wise, Driftwood is a two-minute walk to the beachand 30 minutes (or less on aquiet traffic day) by car fromCork City.

More importantly, the sea is 55m as the gull flies from the site.

There’s a range of shops and services five minutes’ drive away in Crosshaven, and Myrtleville has a good local shop, O’Connell’s, serving the diverse community of year-rounds and blow-ins.

There’s a cafe and ice-cream shop in fine weather and fair weather times by Fountainstown beach, plus the now-regular visit of a mobile sauna, towed in for sea swimmers to blow hot, cold, then hot, then cold again.

VERDICT: There’s going to be serious, moneyed interest in this charming one-off, including most likely those who’ll turn their backs to the house as it stands and look to the future. What, if anything, will remain of Driftwood? Is its name ominous?