A couple with a graphic design background are behind funky €850,000 Gryphon House in Riverstick

Fri, 13 May, 2022 - 00:00

Catherine Shanahan

Riverstick, Co Cork
€850,000
Size	317 sq m (3408 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	4
BER	C1

GRYPHON House is not like so many homes we all know that say nothing about their owners.

A master class in making shrewd use of angles to draw in every ounce of natural light, it sparkles with colour and creativity and makes no bones about abandoning traditional rooflines and bog-standard windows to forge a form that will forever stand out from the crowd.

Turning off the main road at Riverstick, heading briefly across country, its Mediterranean skyblue chimneys signal your first glimpse. Coming up the driveway, it’s the windows that pull you in, particularly an immense corner window in the main bedroom offering endless views of countryside and magnificent skies.

Then there’s the curve of the semi-circular sky-blue wall that encloses the oh-so-private entrance courtyard to Gryphon House, overhung with clematis right now, and next to it, the splayed Indian sandstone steps and patio that front a more public entry point, used by staff and clients when the couple that built this house ran their business from home, pre-Covid.

Given the singularity of Gryphon House, it’s likely you could take a stab at guessing the couple’s background. If you guessed something to do with design, you’d be right. They are Elaine Tierney and Christian Kunnert of Kunnert & Tierney Design, brand consultants with backgrounds in graphic design and art, the creatives behind brand names such as the upmarket Botanika residential development on Blackrock Road, and VoxPro, the once local, now global, customer service and tech support business, sold for €100m by owners Dan and Linda Kiely in 2019.

Elaine and Christian designed Gryphon House and hired architect Alex White (Alexander M White & Associates, Monkstown) to implement their vision.

“We spent a year or two paying attention to features we liked in other houses,” says Elaine, “analyzing what it was that made them feel better. We gave Alex a very detailed brief. He said at the time we were the best prepared clients he had in terms of spec. He came back with a couple of iterations, not a whole pile.” Their home, in Cullen, is up a curved drive, behind another roadside home, that has the same rough cast plaster, white-washed finish. In fact the couple lived there initially.

“It was an original County Council cottage on an acre that had been renovated,” says Elaine, “We bought it in 1994 and moved there from Military Hill in St Lukes (they had renovated the St Lukes’ house themselves).

“The field around it hadn’t been looked after in decades and we used to mow the grass. One day we were sitting on the grass towards the top of the site, which is elevated, and we were commenting on how the view was better from there and what a pity it was the cottage hadn’t been built further back from the road.

“And basically we decided we would build on that part of the site. We went off and got planning permission and it sailed through planning and we built it in 1998.” They built into the 0.75 acre sloping site and Elaine says one of the most successful things about it is how it responds to light.

“In the cottage, we had quite dark small windows,” says Elaine. “When we moved, our key thing was to get in as much light as possible.That’s why the house is positioned as it is. You are coming at it obliquely and it’s generally only one room deep. It means you can have dual and triple aspect windows in a lot of the rooms.

“Everywhere you sit you see a lovely view. You get to pay attention to your surroundings, which a lot of properties don’t facilitate, and it takes you out of yourself.” Features they wanted were all incorporated – high ceilings, extra deep sills, rough cast plaster.

“They all combined to give a very nice feel to the place. All houses have rooms that function, but feel is important too and we saw light as a key part.

“We adore the house, it’s so magical to live in, and it’s so bright. The great thing about a self-build is choosing how you want to live and what you enjoy and what feeds your soul.

“I think that’s one of the things you learn from the business we are in – to have confidence in your own decisions and in how you create space, use space, decorate it.

“We have always, in our personal lives, gone the way that suits our taste. In our commercial lives, we focus on pleasing the clients, but in our personal lives, we can give full reign to how we want to express ourselves,” Elaine says.

The attention to detail at Gryphon House is phenomenal. For instance the worktops in the kitchen – by Celtic Interiors, with upgrades by Cullen View Interiors - are higher than you will find in standard fitted kitchens.

“Worktops were designed at a time when people were shorter. You tilt your back when using a standard worktop. So we had the plinth raised three or four inches to make it more ergonomic.

“Being from a design background helps. When you explain to a good supplier what you want, it’s just a case of using a higher plinth, which is covered over anyway with a standard-size carcass. It lifts it higher off the ground and you don’t have to tiit your back.

“I think it’s just because we don’t notice these things or question them that we don’t change them, but when you are building your own home, it gives you the opportunity to do so, and to do other things like having extra large windows fitted and a bigger staircase, those kinds of things.

“A lot of people don’t realise that there are options. Not everyone is interested in design and space and their immediate environment in the same way that we are, but we have always been very much about our environment, whether it’s our home or our garden or the workplace,” Elaine says.

They paid especial attention to the windows, many of them standout features in their own right.

For instance overlooking the dining area in the open plan kitchen diner, above the French doors to the decked patio and terraced garden, is double height, south-facing glazing that rises up to the vaulted ceiling.

Halfway up the custom-design teak staircase to the first floor is another double-height window, where the ceiling rises again into a vault.

On the landing at the top of the staircase, a rough cast plaster wall overlooks the vaulted hallway.

It’s an open, bright gallery that looks out towards the front garden. The gallery runs above the kitchen diner too, with library/home-office options, and is glazed where the two interface, under the vault, bringing in even more natural light.

The massive corner window in the main bedroom in the newer wing of the house is an obvious talking point, as is the corner window in a small lounge off the Art Studio (could be a studio/playroom/guest bedroom), also in the new wing, at the rear of the house.

There are variations on clerestory windows in a large lounge in the new wing, above a king-size hearth fitted with an 8kw Henley woodburning stove (“We wanted to be able to see the sky and the trees on that side of the house, but we also wanted it to be private,” says Elaine).

There are turret-like windows at the front of the old wing, where upstairs there’s a bedroom and downstairs, a very cosy, triple-aspect, sunken living room, open plan to the kitchen diner, with a stunning cast iron French art nouveau fireplace.

The fireplace, along with fabulous double doors that lead from the hallway to this open plan area, were found in an old architectural salvage yard at the end of the Blackrock road.

The opening in which the doors were fitted was designed to accommodate them, Elaine says.

“They came from a school and we had them restored. A great carpenter created the frames to hold the glazing in place and we put on contemporary door knobs. I’ve always liked the mix of young and old genres of furniture, “says Elaine.

The mix of old and new is reflected across the 3,408 sq ft of Gryphon House, where a new wing was added, also by Alex White, in 2007. Tired of commuting and paying high office rents, Elaine and Christian decided to move their workplace home, literally, by building a new design studio on the ground floor of the new wing, installing a separate entrance and creating a couple of offices off a tiled hallway that leads from the older wing to the new. These rooms are equally suitable as bedrooms, and there’s a guest WC and cloakroom off this hallway too.

There are three more double bedrooms upstairs. In fact, the main bedroom is more of a suite, huge in size, with a 14ft ceiling, a walk-in wardrobe with a window to let in morning light from the east and a luxury ensuite with underfloor heating.

Down the corridor, at the opposite side of the landing is the triple aspect bedroom with turret windows, a stove and double doors to a potential balcony.

Halfway between these two bedrooms is what used to be the main bedroom, its size inspired many years ago by a visit to Derrynane House in Kerry.

“I remember thinking the principal bedroom was exactly the right size, not too big or too small. So I measured it with my feet and replicated the size in our bedroom when we built the house,” she says. She made sure it was double aspect too, but one window had to later give way to a wall in the new extension. They overcame that light loss by adding glass cubes in an internal wall along a bright corridor, ensuring more light, but also privacy.

There’s a phenomenal level of attention to detail throughout, from the placing of the utility off the kitchen where light was at a minimum to keep food storage temperatures cool; to the painting and repainting of the kitchen until they got exactly the right shade of turquoise; to the placing of windows to wring the maximimum out of the south-westerly aspect, to the bright yellow entrance door inside the gated courtyard, to the fantastic garden layout, with warm sandstone and paved paths and patio areas on the east, west and south sides of the house, and carousel-pink walls and steps to different tiers, and raised flower beds, none of it touched by chemicals or pesticides.

And now, Elaine and Christian are planning to move on.

“We had a mix of employees and contractors working from our home but we no longer need to accommodate people. I don’t think the staff will ever be back, Covid changed all of that. So here we are right-sizing, re-staging, re-pivoting for the next stage in our lives,” says Elaine.

“Life is random, surreal and short and I hope we have one last great adventure in us and I hope that we find a lovely, new creative supportive space that wraps its arms around us the way Gryphon House has and that the next owners will get a sense of that and buy into it and love it,” she adds.

Joint selling agent for Gryphon House are Lawrence Sweeney of Savills and Suzanne Tyrrell of Cohalan Downing and the guide price is €850,000. Mr Sweeney expects international interest, as well from those who returned from abroad during the pandemic and have been seeking a quality home.

Equally he predicts interest from those looking for a base in Ireland with a longterm plan to return here.” He adds that it’s “a perfect home for a growing family” and that there are options to create separate living quarters in the new wing where the art studio/lounge is plumbed for a kitchen.

Ms Tyrrell says there’s a great range of accommodation “that could be re-purposed in so many ways”.

“It’s a fabulous home, everything is so precisely done and with such care and dedication,” she adds.

Location-wise, it’s 20 minutes from Cork city, 15 from Cork Airport and 11 minutes from Kinsale.

VERDICT: A house you could never fall out of love with. A true original that some lucky family should get to enjoy.

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