Good times beckon at €975,000 Blackrock Village home — leaving family hands after 130 years

Victorian home has never before been sold - so now's the chance to buy

Rear view of 1 Glandore Villas,  Blackrock Village, guided at €975,000 by agent James G Coughlan

Blackrock Road, Cork City
€975,000
Size	305 sq m (3,300 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	4
BER	D1

THE selling agent for 1 Glandore Villas says, in his sales description “miss this home for life at your peril.”

Front view of semi-detached 1 Glandore Villas

It’s hardly hyperbole that it’s a home for life: after all, it has been in the vendors’ family since it was first built in the very heart of Blackrock village, about 130 years ago.

The tall, robust and superbly set and sited semi-detached Victorian home was built in 1893 and was one of a cluster owned by the Leahy family who had a boot and shoe manufacturing business on the Grand Parade.

They built at least three houses, for three Leahy sisters, on what was then Blackrock village farmland where the land sale beneficiaries ran to over a dozen persons, many with clerical backgrounds and West Cork roots, according to the detailed title deeds, which peculiarly enough specified that the houses to be built must be worth at least £150.

Maps of the time show Blackrock’s evolution up to that point as fishermens’s cottages to mansions, villas ,terraced homes built from the 1700s, out from the city as gentrification spread and as the better-off classes moved upriver and downriver from the city centre’s marshy core.

2007 extension to the back faces south with deep overhang and brise soleil to reduce solar glare

In fact, when Nos 1 & 2 Glandore Villas were built in the latter end of the 19th century, the village was getting well established: at least one of the two pubs either side of the Villas, the Maple Leaf and the Leaping Salmon, were already up and trading, shown on those maps.

Now, in place of those old maps, devices such as Google Earth show with great clarity this area in the first decades of the 21st century, locating Glandore Villas as just east of St Michael’s Church and just west of Blackrock House (the former Ursuline Convent, with roots back to the 1720s as ‘Pleasant Fields’).

Two schools, one primary, one secondary, along with the village centre, cafes, and pier are about 250m away.

The same Google Earth also shows the size and scale of the side and rear extension added to No 1 back around 2006 by the family now selling, and it’s an unexpected whopper, bringing the already substantial home up to 3,300 sq ft.

Large kitchen/diner

There are rooms over three levels, almost a pyramid shape as the ground floor is clearly the largest, and the top floor is now given over to a super-sized, double aspect main bedroom with large bathroom, complete with raised Jacuzzi bath.

Nos 1 & 2 are a tall pair set between the two thriving Blackrock bars (there’s also the Pier Head at the start of Castle Road) and behind them is a small cluster of private homes, behind electric access gates with the name Glandore Manor on the pillars.

The old lane, Glandore Avenue and its long line of old 19th century fishermen’s cottages is on the easterly side.

There’s a shared entrance to Nos 1& 2 Glandore Avenue, with a low redbrick boundary wall and pillars and the name Glandore Villas carved into an old limestone nameplate.

A large palm tree marks the divide in front of elegant pair of semi-ds, and they share the same brick-paved drive which makes enough space for parking several cars and for turning them.

Front reception

(It is not advised to back out as the entrance is quite flush to the road, without pavement buffer or divide.)

So, this is pure Blackrock village, little and large, side-by-side, and the chance to buy into it with some style, and lots of space, as No 1 is price-guided at €975,000 by selling agent James G Coughlan.

He, and his vendors, can most likely expect it to go over the €1m price mark when people get a full grasp of its measure and measurements, on top of the attraction of location.

After all, the Blackrock Road shows nearly three dozen properties making over €1m since the Price Register first started recording sales from 2010, so it’s not even going to come near price records.

In fact, the Cork market is surprisingly strong and resilient, up to and over €1m at the moment, despite an overall cooling in activity level and less competitive bidding in the past six months.

Indeed, as agent Jim Coughlan says, it’s a home for life.

His vendors have made a lifestyle move west of the city, towards the sea, and so this will be the end of the Leahy/Delap family links with the property.

A Leahy grandmother of the 2022 vendor married a Delap, with that latter family surname well-known in medical and other circles, and around that same period, the early 1930s, No 1 was extended to the side anticipating the new generational life to come.

The other ‘Glandore’ Leahy family name-linked houses have all since changed hands, so this sale is the end of a chapter in one way, and the start of a new one for whomever successfully buys now.

The departing vendors did a very major job on No 1 back in 2006-2008 at pretty considerable expense, using the services of architect Nigel O’Sullivan to design a very large full-width and very deep extension.

They also rewired, replumbed, reconfigured the top floor for a single over-sized suite and upgraded the heating.

The quality, timeless kitchen, with kidney-bean shaped island in painted solid timber and with corner end units was done by master joinery firm, Linehan Designs. Later on, Carrigaline Joinery replaced the original sash windows with new ones in painted hardwood, in virtually all openings bar two or three at the back which are more exposed to wear and tear from the elements, including one dormer up on the roof, a single large pane in a pvc frame.

Kitchen by Linehan Design

The roof was also reslated several decades ago.

So, for home hunters on the prowl now in the greater Blackrock area, No 1 is a supremely well-located ‘lifer,’ with very major work all done in recent years (that’s not always the case with houses which have been generations in the one family’s

hands), but as the move-out and clear-out is well underway, it now begins viewings in a partially ‘undressed’ state.

Carpets have been taken up in the linked, front reception rooms which have feature 10’ ceilings, ornate plasterwork and ceiling roses, on the stairs and in the 1930s-added 24’ by 13’ living room, also with similar ceilings, and with a wood-burning stove set in the wide tiled fireplace.

It won’t take viewers much to imagine their own imprint on the house, as there’s so much that may not need changing.

The hall floor is original tiles; door architraves are old, stripped and honeyed pine. The stairs can be recarpeted, or painted, or a mix, with a wool runner up the middle as has been the case previously (pic, left).

The living rooms can be carpeted, or sanded and painted or stripped back, whilst the wide-plank engineered floor in the sprawling extension wing may need refinishing, while next occupants can paint walls to their own taste and hang art, mirrors, family photographs and furniture to make it their own.

Bathrooms have all been redone in the past 20 years, and include a guest WC by the back utility (where a large dog flap is discernible in the door to a side passage).

A rear bedroom in a return/annex has been reconfigured to give access to a bathroom as an en suite.

Entire top floor is one large, en suite bedroom

There’s also the main family bathroom with bath, plus the contemporary-style en suite on the top floor, with glass wall, mosaic-style tiling, jetted Jacuzzi bath and twin sinks.

Up here, the large bed is, unusually in the room’s mid-section, by a low wall which part divides/defines the space, and very large painted roof trusses show the robustness of the original build and roof profile.

This attic level eyrie has a window facing south over the mature back garden, and another window to the front overlooking the main Blackrock Road as it arrives in the village, and cranes over by Tivoli across the river Lee can be glimpsed.

The look-out nature of this top floor has a resonance in Blackrock’s history: the owners recall family tales of the time over 100 years ago when Black and Tan forces made their way to the top floor to take shots at Old IRA men escaping out the back by Glandore Avenue after being found in conference in one of the pubs next door to Glandore Villas.

Suite dreams: main bedroom with bathroom 

The rear faces due south, so there’s a perfect back garden aspect, and it’s super private and very mature.

It seems to be set out in two or three sections: there’s a wide patio, with a few steps up to a lawn and play area, and there’s a further more hidden garden section beyond plus, very handily, there’s a back-up pedestrian access option onto Glandore Avenue.

No 1 took its most significant shift ever when reconfigured/extended/upgraded over an almost two-year period, between 2006 to 2008.

Whilst the front half is home to three individual rooms with period feel and features, the back add-on was designed to allow for open-plan living for a family, to contrast new with the old, with the more ‘cellular’ rooms in the original plan, says architect Nigel O’Sullivan who was with Jack Coughlan Associates (JCA) at the time and now is with Cork-based Building Design Lab (BD Lab).

It’s got an extensive flat membrane roof with an upstanding roof light close to the house’s back wall and kitchen, with raised panes and sloping profile, made by the builders, Owen and Noel Cafferkey, in quality hardwood.

Then out by the back wall of glass is an unusual circular cut-out over the dining table, with inset concealed lighting and glimpses up to a timber clad higher ceiling section.

The roof projects well past the wide, sliding doors to the patio with an overhang, like a wide-brimmed hat or baseball cap peak.

This, says designer O’Sullivan, was “to provide shelter from the rain, allowing the large sliding door to be open in all weathers.

That external joinery/windows in chunky plain hardwood framed was done by Nobins Windows, whilst the extension’s roof is almost in two sections, each flat, one overlapping the other with tiny bands of clerestory windows or glazing. While engaging, they don’t really seem to capture much extra light or external visual details given how close they are, one just atop the other.

More visually catching is a brise soleil of several slatted timbers to the left of the overhang which “also protects the extension from solar glare at high summer sun and allows for temperature control.

The oversailing roofs were added to give more volume to the extension and created a generous sense of space to the room,” says the architect who explains that “as a consequence of these different volumes, we decided to add the circular cut-out so that the wooden roof could be viewed in the section with the lower ceiling and helped create a relationship between the two.”

VERDICT: Some vendors may have chosen to ‘stage’ a home of this quality (combining two stellar Cork premium property settings in its address, suburban Blackrock and West Cork’s Glandore) in advance of being sold, but paradoxically there’s an honesty to its stripped- out presentation, with little imagination needed to visualise it in next caring and appreciative hands.

Pure Blackrockvillage, little and large