Warm regards: A2-rated Scandi house trucked to Cork from Sweden was miles ahead of its time

Factory-built in Sweden and erected in Cork, this Swedish home laughs at Irish winters, and will be super-easy and affordable to power and heat

Sat, 30 Apr, 2022 - 18:00

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures Niamh Whitty

Glanmire, Cork
€780,000
Size	264 sq m (2,834 sq ft) +offices
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	4
BER	A2

THE WARMEST of welcomes await at this 22-year-old Cork family home, painted a soft primrose colour and with unseen toasty Swedish underfoot roots courtesy of a country that has lived with intense cold and the worst of winter weather for centuries.

Rear view of No 10 Glenrichmond, with balcony

The thought, effort, and quality of materials put into the A2-BER achieving 10 Glenrichmond when imported and built in a mere three months back in 2000 has paid comfort and health dividends to its Irish-Swedish inhabitants year-in, year-out ever since, at a steady 21C internally and with the freshest of filtered air too.

Interior rooms interlink. Note the stove (by the company NIBE), on an interior corner wall for added energy efficiency

Now that they are moving on, with three adult children having flown the nest, the timing of its arrival on the market — with an ever-increasing climate crisis and sky-rocketed energy costs due to the war in Ukraine - couldn’t be more opportune for its owners and its next inhabitants.

The home of Irish woman Margaret Sheeran and her husband Nils-Ove Johansson, No 10 is on the fringes of Cork’s Glanmire/city boundary (not to mention close to the M8 for easy travel further afield), and has featured in these pages before. That was in March 2000, when a crew of four Swedes came to deliver this ordered home (it came in three shipping containers) from Scandinavia, built with slow-growing Nordic pine from high up in Sweden, as robust a wood as you’ll ever get, toughened up by winter temperatures as low as -30C.

Then, the home (manufacturer was Sjodalshus/Gotenehus, Sweden) was featured here again in July 2001, after its first anniversary had passed. Later, its interiors got covered in our Home/Interiors section.

It hit the pages of the then Sunday Tribune late in 2001 and in 2002 it featured in House & Home magazine. The Sunday Times followed on in March of that year, such was the mix of build-method novelty (it is steps above “kit homes”, which followed widely in Celtic Tiger times) , its introduction to proven technologies from Sweden, and its energy efficiency/low-running costs.

There's a lot of property in the mix at this Glenrichmond Glanmire home

It also got picked up in Passive House magazine (issue 35), sort of the bible of energy efficiency construction, which at the time looked at its high insulation levels, NIBE heat pumps (supplied via Unipipe), and other elements.

Standards-driven owners Margaret and Nils-Ove even set up a business from their home, the Swedish Trade Centre Ltd, acting as agents for a range of Swedish house products, triple-glazed windows and more, while Margaret herself project managed a number of builds of homes in Ireland with Swedish origins.

Since those early days and blaze of media coverage, the owners haven’t sat on their comfortable laurels. Just prior to their plans to sell up, they have fitted banks of photovoltaic (PV) panels, which supply much of today’s energy needs. These can be backed up by battery storage, and a smart meter (app controlled on a phone) shows production, consumption, and any seasonal surpluses that can be sold back to the national grid.

The couple reckons they use 8,000-9,000kW hours a year and their PV panels give them 5,400kW hours a year. They got 600kW hours in March alone and are smitten with the easily run (and easily paid for) technology at an unmittened fingertip.

Garage, home office and store all in one

The technology even covers the running costs of ‘Oscar’, their robotic battery-charged Husqvarna lawnmower. It silently nibbles at their lawns, to a programmed route map, eerily looking like a horticultural, grass-eating turtle as it goes about its business of keeping the lawns as pristine as the house’s calm interiors.

That’s all to the benefit of No 10’s next owners, as it comes to market this weekend with a €780,000 AMV quoted by Sherry FitzGerald agents Ann O’Mahony and Gillian McDonnell.

The price includes Oscar: the Sheeran-Johansson family won’t need it as they are moving to an apartment in Dublin, and it is not needed on their farm in Sweden, where they’ve had similar heating technology since the 1990s in a century-plus-old family home.

That €780,000 AMV is for a four-bed detached Glanmire hygge home, clearly in a restrained Scandi style. In showhouse order, it is as fresh as it was back in 2001 when seen here as a fledgling one-off.

The detached 2,834 sq ft ( m) property is on nearly half an acre in Glenrichmond, amid other sizeable and individual detached family homes.

No 10 comes with an adjacent large (550sq ft/52sq m) compartmentalised garage/office and store, with attic overhead. At the diagonal garden end is a further garden room, about 250 sq ft (24 sq m), fully self-contained with services, kitchenette, etc, and ideal for a gym/studio, home office and/or more. Guests won’t mind being banished here either, it’s very comfortable (but official regulations don’t allow such garden rooms to be used for sleeping in).

The main house — pretty much all timber and now even more ultra-low-energy after its PV hat on the roof was added this year — has a very adaptable floor plan, with one of its four bedrooms at ground level. Three more are overhead either side of a central first floor, spacious living room with balcony access overlooking the expansive sandstone patio, garden, office, and garden room.

One of the upstairs bedrooms is en suite, sanitary ware is Villeroy & Boch, and the heat pump-sourced heating is underfloor on both levels.

External doors open out, not in —again a very sensible design touch, for fast/emergency escape — and even more robust resilience

for safety’s sake. Also on the security front are electric access gates and an alarm system with CCTV.

Much of what makes this well-secured home so comfortable is, of course, discreetly out of sight. Swedish company Sundolit AB did the specialist foundations, with 300mm of dense aeroboard insulation, while walls have 240mm rock mineral wool, and the attics have 400mm of rock wool.

Cork architects Jack Coughlan Associates kept an eye on the project back in 2000, and recommended local specialist contractors such as Cathal Conlon for plumbing and Manning Electrical (there’s three-phase power), along with a mechanical ventilation system for air purity and heat recovery, with twice-hourly air changes for a healthy indoor climate (35-45% humidity.) Solar panels are by Eddie O’Meara of Munster Solar.

Among the array of domestic appliances are a built-in ironing board and a drying cabinet for clothes drying/airing (quite standard in Sweden), which reduces the need for ironing. The house also has a central vacuum system. (Is Oscar a tad disappointed to see that there is not a Swedish robotic vacuum cleaner it could strike up a relationship with?)

The house — which could easily pass as a woodland home in Canada or the northern states of the US — has a painted timber exterior, pale yellow and white, done in hard-wearing Jotun paints. The attic level has feature, half-moon shaped gable windows on high, bringing light into the 500sq ft floored attic, while sturdy metal drainpipes and gutters are curved.

There are also storage options at ground- and first-floor levels, and the garage has a floored attic, while the garage/office/store has underfloor heating of its own.

In terms of rooms, there’s an entrance hall/foyer next to a curving, ash staircase, three interconnecting reception rooms, with wide patio doors to the sandstone patio, and a curved energy-efficient NIBE stove in one of the linked rooms (in an internal corner, for extracting every calorie of heat). The kitchen has tiles from Fired Earth in the UK between units by Kvanum Kok AB, one of Sweden’s most highly regarded manufacturers.

There are expansive internal views (including one front to back), with few corridors, and the overall feel is of warmth and light — both of which could be at a premium in Sweden during the long dark winters if not addressed and maximised by good house design.

Colour is kept to display items. Other than that walls are white for the most part and ceilings (2.7m high at ground level) are in lime-washed timber sheeting to allow traces of the wood’s grain to come through. Wood floors are in wide plank oak, and floor tiles are, for the most, part Italian.

The decor includes blinds, check fabrics and stripes, quite quintessentially Swedish or Gustavian design in muted shades, and it all works with a mix of old/antique furniture and more modern counterparts.

Nils-Ove and Margaret have also lived in Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, and Australia, as well as Sweden and Ireland, so there’s an eclectic mix of finishes and furnishings that feature and have made themselves very much at home here, including some very fine 20th-century rosewood office pieces that can be purchased with the house.

Cosily wrapping up their lengthy sales brochure, Sherry Fitz’s Ms McDonnell and Ms O’Mahony say No 10 Glenrichmond will pique both interest and bidding actions, and say it’s “quintessentially Scandinavian in both design and functionality, a truly unique home on a most private and beautifully landscaped Cork site”.

VERDICT: If it made sense to build like this in 2000, how much more comforting and sensible is it now, in the midst of a climate and energy crisis? Evangelical vendor Margaret Sheeran says wood-built homes of this standard in native Scandinavian climes last for centuries, and will similarly last generations when properly rooted in Ireland.

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