Pretty as a picture in Castletroy as artist's touch shines through
12 Newtown Park, Limerick
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Castletroy, Co Limerick |
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€550,000 |
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Size |
180 sq m (1938 sq ft) |
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Bedrooms |
4 |
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Bathrooms |
3 |
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BER |
C2 |
IT takes a fair bit of flair to put together a home as richly textured as 12 Newtown Park in Castletroy.
Individual rooms are so skillfully curated that they almost look like still-life paintings.
The same could be said of the garden, where different elements are expertly woven together to create a choice of colourful seating areas.
For instance where lots of gardens struggle to recover following the removal of a trampoline, this one made a feature of the patch in question because the owner had the foresight to plant flowerbeds around it. As the children grew, so did the flowerbeds and when the trampoline was finally retired, instead of wasteland, a perfectly formed circular flowerbed was left behind.
A wooden arch was added at the entry point and wooden seating placed inside, along with a water feature — it looks like a scene straight from a painting, but then again it was all done with an artist’s eye.
“It’s become a kind of secret garden,” says the artist in question, Anne McNamee, who lives at No 12 with her husband. Anne’s artistry has shaped not just her home and garden, but her livelihood. In her student years, she attended the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, but left before completing her course, following a job offer in London, at an art gallery in Muswell Hill. Within two years of taking up the post, she was running the place. She stayed in London for another three years, working in the art world, before returning to Cork “where I was self-employed for the majority of my working life, which included 15 years working as an interior designer”.
Art was her first love though, and she spent years developing her technique, attending courses and gradually moving from painting in oils to acrylics on canvas, which is now her favourite medium.
Some of her artworks decorate the walls of her own home and combined with her talent for interior design, she knows exactly how to showcase them. She says she “has no difficulty working with interior designers or advising private buyers on how to make art part of the overall design of their home”.
In her own home, she concentrated on achieving different looks in different rooms. For instance she wanted a restaurant-style kitchen, with open shelving and everything visible and accessible, and with room for a huge cookbook collection, as she’s a very keen chef.
“I’m very into cooking, I am someone that loves to feed people and so the kitchen is designed to be a very ergonomic workspace with a big family table,” she says. To give it a vintage feel, she bought vintage lights from a chap who said they came for “some old pub in Dublin in the 50s”.
“I am always struck by lighting; how it can make or break a room, how it can master the feeling you want in a room,” Anne says, “so I have French-style chandeliers in the sitting room because I was watching a lot of Downton Abbey at the time and I was inspired by the timeless elegance of the interiors.
Hence the wooden panelling in the room too and the breakfast sideboard,” she says.
She collects both antiques and secondhand pieces, including the blue-and-white china in the kitchen, much of it willow pattern, mostly mismatched, picked up from charity shops.
More of Anne’s handiwork is on display upstairs. In the main bedroom, she used left-over emulsion to create a feature wall. It’s a cherry blossom tree, where Anne painted the branches first, and then added tiny little flowers.
“We love it, it’s very different,” she says.
On the landing is a beautiful landscape — one of her favourite subjects, along with seascapes, abstracts, florals, and magic realism.
“The common denominator is that I try to capture a sense of emotion in each piece. Everything I paint is expressed with a harmonious balance of colour, light and form,” Anne says (see some of her work on Instagram @anneelizabetharts).
That harmonious balance is strongly present in her own home which comes to market as she and her husband prepare to downsize after many happy years at what she describes as “a lovely, comfortable family home”.
The area it’s in, Castletroy, has been “a fantastic environment” for children and teens, she says, with “lots of great schools (Castletroy College Secondary School, Monaleen National School and Milford National School). It’s an area to which families gravitate, she says, and it’s near University of Limerick — currently celebrating its 50th birthday and with possibly the country’s best sports’ campus.
Peter Kearney of Rooney auctioneers is the selling agent and he says No 12 is “an opportunity to acquire a super detached property”. His guide price for the 180 sq m four-bed is €550,000. It comes with a reasonable C2 energy rating and some recent upgrades: It’s been freshly repainted (by the artist), new carpets have been laid, new bathrooms installed, and new flooring.
It’s light-filled throughout, from the entrance hall with handmade Moroccan light fittings, to the kitchen diner, to the living room with its solid oak floor and bespoke wooden shutters, to the cosy family room/playroom/home office (whatever you need it to be).
It truly is turnkey and all contents can be included if a buyer is interested.
: Expertly nurtured by the artist in residence, No 12 is an elegant blend of comfort and taste. A cracking family home with a splendid rear garden.
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