Next best thing to living on a cruise ship at €495,000 Cobh period home

No 2 Merview has a ringside seat of the harbour and a Nottinghill interior

Sun, 22 May, 2022 - 12:37

Catherine Shanahan Pictures: KC 3D Tours

Cobh, Co Cork
€495,000
Size	200 sq m (2153 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	Exempt

THERE are options now for people who want to live permanently on a cruise ship, in the form of floating apartment blocks, with multi million euro condos. You can fill them with your own bits and bobs, like a home-from-home, as you circumnavigate the globe.

It could get tiresome, spending your days bumping into the same faces or finding yourself stranded on a floating pandemic hotspot. The safer option might be to buy a home that kinda feels like being aboard a liner, like No 2 Merview, in Cobh.

If you stand towards the back of the hall in No 2 and direct your gaze to the long window that drops down the rear wall, over the stairs that lead to basement level, all you can see is the ocean moving beneath you. It’s like looking down from on-high, from a liner, to the sea below.

As Merview is on a hill above the harbour, there is nothing to obscure your view. Every window to the rear has a stunning vista, which you would never guess if you saw it only from the roadside, where it presents as an elegant, terraced, townhouse, with no hint of a harbour perspective.

You wouldn’t guess either from the roadside that it’s a four-storey property, because the basement level isn’t visible and the fourth floor is the result of an attic conversion.

The attic conversion is just one of the many renovations undertaken by the couple that owns No 2 since they bought it in 2007.

“It was pretty run down,” says the woman of the house, who had been living in another Cobh property, until advised by her next-door-neighbour to check out No 2.

“She had been in No 2 once and she knew that it had beautiful views. She reckoned we’d love it, and she was right,” the woman of the house says.

Even though No 2 was in a fairly raw state, its potential was obvious and the couple fell in love with it. Having bought it, they overhauled it, replacing the roof, putting in new windows at the seaward-facing side and ripping out the tiny basement kitchen.

They replaced it with a gorgeous, open plan living space, with kitchen/dining at one end, and a roomy lounge at the harbour-facing end, from where two steps lead to a fully-glazed door that opens onto the most delightful south-facing sunken patio, with jaw-dropping views of anything that moves on the harbour.

Liners that pass by seem almost within arm’s reach, as captured in photos taken by the owners, who are delighted to see cruise ships returning to Cobh after a couple of tough years for the tourist-primed town. The couple put in a new bathroom in the basement and beyond it is a second glass door to the patio where storage benches line either side and are painted in fresh, Mediterranean colours.

The land drops away beyond the patio so that the row of houses below it, on Harbour Road, does not disrupt the view, while exotic planting at a neighbouring property adds to the overseas feel.

Overseas is something that has featured heavily in the lives of the couple living in Merview, whom, the man of the house says, have led “a very peripatetic life”. Having met in London, they subsequently spent a few years in Mauritius, before moving to Australia where they bought a house and 60 acres outside Melbourne. As a house-warming present, a friend gave them a couple of pigs. They renovated the house (their first experience of doing so) and over the next two decades, they reared three children and built up their pig herd from two to 500. “That would be called a hobby farm in Australia,” the man of the house laughs. After their children were reared, they returned to Cobh in 2001. They bought No 2 in 2007 from Victoria Murphy, by coincidence mother of Johanna Murphy, the agent who is now selling it on their behalf as they are feeling the urge to move on again.

“We hate the thought of parting with this house and if our extended family lived in Ireland, we’d love to stay here,” the woman of the house says.

The next owner is going to love it too. Its Victorian heritage has been very much respected, as is obvious from its roadside façade (original fanlight, original street railings, black and white tiled pathway) and at entry floor level, where two adjoining reception rooms, off the high ceiling hallway, have original fireplaces, cornicing and floorboards.

The rooms can be opened up as they are connected via double doors, so the views can be enjoyed from both, but particularly from the large harbour-facing window seat in the living room.

Décor at basement level - where a new Viessmann gas boiler was installed - has a more contemporary feel, while on the two overhead floors, fireplaces have been retained in the bedrooms, of which there are three, all doubles, on the first floor, as well as a bathroom, while the main bedroom, with veluxes letting lots of light in, is in the converted attic, next door to the third bathroom.

Johanna Murphy describes No 2 as “a stunning, charismatic townhouse, very much Nottinghill style”. She is guiding the property at €495,000 and expects interest from Cork city, the UK and the USA – from where she says strong interest is currently emanating vis-à-vis Cobh properties.