A-bandon the blues at this warm and colourful €675k West Cork one-off

Interior designer put her stamp and skill on her family home

Fri, 26 Aug, 2022 - 07:00

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures John Roche

Dunmanway Road, Bandon West Cork
€675,000
Size	313 sq m (3,300 sq ft) + 146 sq ft detached home office/gym
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	5
BER	B2

CALLED Grianan (meaning “sunny place”), this is a walk-in property in more ways than one.

Home has a detached separate multi-purpose room with solar panels for the property's water heating

An immaculate, sturdy, and well-designed modern home fresh to an August 2022 market, it’s not just ready to move into, but there’s a brand-new footpath passing its lovely approach drive all the way back to Bandon town, as new housing continues to progress out along the Dunmanway Road.

It’s been a family home since it was built in 2005 to the one clan, and with three sons reared and relocated, the folks are looking set to do the same thing; willing to take on another property, only a smaller one, and even further into West Cork, with the hunt starting once they sell here.

Section of wall came down between a reception room and the kitchen/dining room

They would love to knock down a wall or two in whatever they end up in, as it’s something they did even here just a few years ago, doing an “easy” internal reconfiguration. They reckon it completely changed the way they used their home for the better; linking one of the two front main receptions to a very large kitchen/diner behind, all with an interiors panache — not unsurprising as the couple’s professional work background spans retail, property, and interiors.

An impressive, B2-rated five-bed home, Grianan was built to replace an older dwelling a mile or so west of the town of Bandon, on a mature site facing south overlooking Bandon’s Castle Bernard (an 18th-century castellated pile burned down in 1921 and with its ruins still standing as a ghostly outline).

Long lens view of Castle Bernard from Grianan

It is just visible from the first floor’s trio of dormer windows. Views beneath also cover Bandon Golf Club, but that’s disappearing now behind maturing woodland just west of Bandon’s leafy Laurel Walk.

The location’s within a walk of the town and of national schools and a secondary school (Hamilton High) and suited the family here as the lads grew up, getting good use of the internal accommodation, the mature landscaped grounds, and also of a detached multi-purpose building, used as a playroom, store, and gym. Built to residential standards and insulated, it could be further upgraded as a granny flat or home office and already carries the solar panel tubes for heating water for the main house, helping it get a very decent BER of B2.

The house has joint selling agents, straddling both the city and West Cork markets, with city-based Michael McKenna taking up one end of the viewings, and he’s joined by Clonakilty-based Ernest Forde of Hodnett Forde, and they guide it at an AMV of €675,000 — the second listing on the Dunmanway Road this summer at this price levels. It follows on the listing of a similar-sized but older home, Bracken, built in 1918 on a half an acre of great gardens and which was featured in these pages in June.

Like its venerable, older-era neighbour Bracken, Grianan also has peaked dormers and a cloak of verdant growth around its lower section, a gentle climbing hydrangea that has white flowers in season.

After less than 20 years of growth, it has added a lovely patina to this property, as well as obviating the need to paint the external render: It’s well established and colonised on the south-facing front facade, right along the deep western wall too, and is continuing its route-march now also on the eastern approach gable.

Approach avenue gives a glimpse of the home through leafy framing trees

There are few clues as to the size of this home from outside, it’s almost deliberately modest, and is only glimpsed once you come to the end of a picturesque, tree-edged avenue at an angle off the Dunmanway Road, a right-of-way approach that lends mystery as to what might be just up there past the trees.

There’s farmland behind, with the fields running back to the Newcestown/Béal na Bláth road, and signalling this home’s presence from the road is a very mature monkey puzzle tree which long predates this house’s arrival.

The previous house’s owner had a business doing groundworks, and he put an impregnable, sturdy retaining wall to the back of this site, and another midway in the sloping garden, creating a two-tier layout, now extensively planted with trees, shrubs, and various beds, while hidden in the lower, west corner are steps down to a pedestrian gate for a second access point to this walkable, edge-of-Bandon family home par excellence.

If the size is deceptive, at c 2,800 sq ft, what’s also unexpected is the almost art gallery-like array of art and craft and good furniture (much of them are auction buys) and lighting inside in a very well-laid out house, with good-sized rooms throughout, and even an extra bit of height at the ground floor level, some nine foot. It makes a difference.

That bit of extra height too allows for some dramatic lighting and even chandeliers, each one highly individual and the owners hope to take most with them when they pack up and go unless a buyer makes a persuasive case and/or really covet them.

The attention to detail spans lots of side and task lights too, and lamps and lighting in the two main reception rooms can be linked and centrally controlled by dimmers via a 5-amp wiring setup.

It’s a bonus that comes from “inside” trade knowledge, as the woman of the house previously had a high-end, high-quality lighting shop, Moonlighting, in Bandon, and an interiors shop also, called Etcetera.

Even a cursory visit to this

home suggests not everything that was stocked in the shops downtown got sold! There’s a covetous collector’s eye at work here given the abundance of paintings, prints, sculpture, glass (including some heavyweights by the company Svaja), and ceramics, while furniture spans the contemporary to the classic, and includes a number of art deco small pieces, such as a drinks cabinet and side tables.

The woman of the house admits to an eclectic taste and knows her building trades, with siblings ‘in the know’ such as a plumber brother who oversaw the plumbing. The main contractor was builder Christy Day while joiner TJ O’Leary did the stairs, kitchen, built-ins, and other adaptations to a high level.

Several main bedroom options: this en suite one with walk-through dressing room is upstairs with a generous dormer seating area

Grianan is a house that has evolved a bit over time since built in 2005. The owners had allowed for a section of one internal wall to be removed if ever needed when building back day-one by having a steel RSJ (rolled steel joist) between the kitchen/diner and one of the two equal-sized front reception room. They had the same builder who put up the wall return a few years ago to take it back out, and it transformed the way they used the house, moved through it, welcomed guests, celebrated Christmas or big family occasions, or just chill out in the evenings.

Having knocked the old house on this c 0.3-acre site to get just what they wanted, to their own design, it was hardly likely that a mere internal wall was ever going to stand in their way and it evokes a sort of Dermot Bannon-like notion of what they’ll do and say at whatever property they next cast an eye over. Don’t stand in the way....

Aside from the art and decor and practical repurposing of old furniture; there are excellent finishes here to appreciate.

The hall and kitchen are floored in a terracotta red marble, thick chunky stuff. The kitchen splashback and island tops look to be million-dollar stone or marble, but are in fact large one-metre tiles, heavy and with the heft of serious quality. The owners at one stage had the island extended, again by joiner TJ O’Leary before redoing the tops.

“Other people do extensions, I just enlarged an island,” quips the design-savvy owner who, among other attributes, has worked as a colour consultant for a paint company.

Floors are in very good timbers: walnut on the room on the right, and narrow strip oak floors in the one on the left, and in the bedrooms, all painstakingly done, strip by strip with salvaged hardwoods.

There’s a flexible layout to the bedrooms making this a home suitable for families of all sizes and different generations as there’s a good ensuite bedroom with dressing room/walk-in/walk-through wardrobes on each level, with masses of clothes and shoe storage, with clever use of shop fittings and display rails used at various heights — again, the knowing and practical eye.

All four first-floor bedrooms are good-sized doubles. Upstairs, the largest en suite bedroom is double aspect and has the best views over the tree tops across the road to Castle Bernard from the front dormer window.

This house’s windows are by Westco, with a very slender discrete “leading” on the double glazing, and with tilt and turn frames (black on the exterior and white on the inside) with various window treatments, from smart drapes to roller blinds.

Eye-catching too is the use of carpet runners which are made into rugs in some rooms and as the stair runner too, in a range of colours like a Gustav Klimt painting — a stand-out feature by the walnut stairs with black painted side, and with black metal spindles under a walnut handrail.

Kitchen units are hand-painted in a mix of sympathetic colours and three free-standing large presses hold a multitude. Handily, there’s a small stainless steel sink next to the range cooker, with another steel sink and drainer along another wall under that dramatic, gleaming tile splashback. Elsewhere, in the rear utility, a deep ceramic Belfast sink has been set into an old ornate, carved pine unit, topped with a scrubbed and gentle sloping wood draining board.

Free-standing display and storage shelving abounds in what’s clearly been a busy and bustling household (DJ mixing desks are up in bedrooms with guitars and even surfboards), as well as lots of bookshelves and niches and alcoves have been set into the eaves... There’ll be a lot of packing to do.

Services are mains water and waste, with OFCH and two solid fuel stoves, one in each reception room, but a little bit of fuel goes a long way, say the owners of their home, warm in practical terms as well as in visual appearance, and there’s a gas supply too to the property, but it’s not used.

Family bathroom with glass side bath panel

Solar-powered lights crop up around the grounds; the perimeter and west-facing stone-finished patio, with thick limestone steps to the Georgian villa-like front door framed with side and top glazing and flanked left and right by slate-topped bay windows. The first-floor dormers also are slate-hung, helping to keep maintenance to a minimum.

Both owners are keen on their garden, with year-round colour, lots of hydrangeas, acers, and a dramatic Japanese acer, native shrubs, and that stand-out monkey puzzle tree, which can be floodlit at night.

VERDICT: A top-quality, almost timeless-in-appearance home on the edge of Bandon. It is easily reached from Cork City, and with West Cork and its beaches to the south and away to the west.

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