If natural beauty is your thing, this €550,000 woodland lodge in Beara is magical

Waterfall Lodge is carefully crafted to make the most of the sights and sounds of the river

Sun, 18 Dec, 2022 - 11:03

Catherine Shanahan

Castletownbere, West Cork
€550,000
Size	1400 sq ft + 700 sq ft
Bedrooms	2 + 1
Bathrooms	1 + 1
BER	C2

IF you were to identify a starting point for the building of Waterfall Lodge, you could probably pin it to the arrival on site of a motorbike, with a boathouse on the back of it, in the late 1980s.

The boathouse in question had belonged to The Wheel Inn, a disco and holiday centre opened in Castletownbere in 1979 by an enterprising Dutch couple, Joop and Ronnie Van Etten, who had visited Ireland the previous October at the height of an Indian summer.

“The sun shone for the entire month and they thought that was what the weather was like in the sunny south,” laughs their daughter-in-law Eilís Ní Longaigh.

“But in the first year that they moved here, there was an oil spill (the Whiddy Island disaster), a postal strike (ran for 18 weeks) and a petrol shortage (1979 oil crisis).

“They battled on anyhow, and made the venture successful,” Eilís says, adding that the holiday centre is now the Berehaven Lodges.

Eilís’s involvement with the Van Etten’s came about some time after she moved from Cork City to Castletownbere in 1985 to take up a temporary position as an art teacher. Her intention was to stay six months – she had the travel bug, having trekked in India and Nepal - but in the end, she never left. She met Danny Van Etten, son of Joop and Ronnie, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Danny, in Ireland from the age of 11 and now an Irish citizen, had a strong connection with Castletownbere. His mother and father had bought a house on woodland on the Hungry Hill side of Castletownbere, near the seashore, and it was to this woodland that Danny repaired with the boathouse, on the back of his motorbike, in the ‘80s.

A builder by trade (and also a delivery skipper) he crafted a workshop out of the boathouse and later, a chalet out of the workshop, and to this day, the boathouse structure remains, albeit it’s now the bathroom of the chalet. The front door of the chalet he salvaged from his parents’ house and the bed is made from timber salvaged from a shipwreck, off Roancarrig, in Bantry Bay.

This 65 sq m (700 sq ft) single bedroom chalet, which remains on the land (with AirBnB potential) is where Eilís and Danny initially lived, before Waterfall Lodge was built, also by Danny.

“Waterfall Lodge had very much an organic beginning and we were still living in the chalet when our daughter Julie was born,” Eilís says.

They got planning permission for 130 sq m (1400 sq ft) Waterfall Lodge in 1996 and, excluding the blockwork, Danny built it himself, based on a design by popular West Cork architect Tony Cohu, and under the supervision of DMCA consulting engineers in Bantry.

The house he built is very much in sync with its beautiful woodland setting, just above the banks of the Owgarriff River, which runs along the site’s eastern boundary.

Denis Harrington of Harrington Estates who is selling the house, says there’s a “Scandinavian feel to it, enhanced by its woodland setting and the river that borders it”.

“It’s a very well thought-out house, with an unusual design based around the sights and sounds of the river. It’s carefully crafted to combine with its beautiful natural environs,” he adds.

Those beautiful environs have been as carefully crafted as the house itself, with the couple determined to focus on growing native woodland and plants such as rhododendrons, hollies, heather, ferns and native Irish trees such as hazel, oak and mountain ash. They cleared out Silver Firs at a cost of €1,000 a pop.

In some respects, the pandemic was a godsend as it cut them more leeway to work in the garden and they developed a series of woodland paths and built ponds. There are patios too: a ground floor bedroom in the main house has patio door access to the riverbank terraces and woodland treks, while the guest cottage/chalet, next to a courtyard, opens onto a decking area overlooking the riverbank.

All of this beauty – into which the occasional deer wanders – is laid out against the mountainy backdrop of Hungry Hill, while the sea is a two minute walk away. The site isn’t utterly isolated either – a near neighbour is movie director Neil Jordan and his wife Brenda.

Mr Harrington says Waterfall Lodge is “without comparison on the Beara Península”, but with retirement beckoning, the couple hopes to downsize to a property where they can properly put their feet up. And so they’ve put their home, chalet and 3.9 acres up for sale, with a guide price of €550,000.

The house itself contains much of Danny’s handiwork, including two steel surround fireplaces. He built the kitchen too, which is open plan to the dining room, where there are south-facing seas views. The entire top floor is given over to the main bedroom and a study.

Mr Harrington says such is the privacy and tranquility of the setting, that the house may appeal to someone looking to run a spiritual retreat, offering holistic therapies.

In fact he's already had overseas enquiries from previous visitors to Dzogchen Beara, a Buddist retreat centre in Allihies, also on the Beara Peninsula. "There's something of a therapeutic nature about the place," he says.