Upside down, back-to-front, inside-out Tahilla has glorious Cork harbour views

High above Lake Road, this €495,000 Cobh home is not your typical Irish dwelling

Sat, 06 May, 2023 - 09:21

Catherine Shanahan

Cobh, Co Cork
€495,000
Size	195 sq m (2100 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	4
BER	Pending

TAHILLA embraces many of the staples of a traditional Greek villa: whitewashed walls, pale blue shutters, multiple levels, a selection of outdoor spaces, lots of little nooks.

Its garden has an exotic feel too, a lush mix of bamboo, ferns, a kiwi climber, tall trees and giant prehistoric-looking greenery, that botanists known as Gunnera, and Jurassic Park fans as Dinosaur Food.

It also has a watery vista, alas not of the Aegean Sea, but over the vast sweep of Cork Harbour, which looks pretty good too from the curving terrace that runs along Tahilla’s uppermost level.

It seems fitting that exotic-looking Tahilla, high above Lake Road in Cobh, was built by the official holders of the title Most Romantic Couple in Ireland, a pair of creatives who were not afraid to think outside the box.

“The first thing we did when we got the site was to bring up ladders and stick them up through the briars, to see how high we would need to go to get the view.

“We wanted the dining room and the main bedroom at a height where we could see down over the harbour and the rest of the house just grew from there,” says Dr Gráinne Cahill, whose late husband, John Frenett, designed Tahilla, with her input.

They were gifted the site in 1988 by John’s family who had moved to Lake Road from Rushbrooke. With a large garden in front of their own elevated property, the family gave the land behind it to John. It was pretty overgrown at the time, but the couple cleared it and built up the foundation to ensure Tahilla rose above the Frenett family home.

They designed it in such a way that the two biggest rooms have the best views. They added a terrace off these two rooms too and it’s Tahilla’s crowning glory, the perfect height from which to scan the entire habour, from behind the safety of a whitewashed wall and raised, redbrick, flower beds.

The whole thing knits together so prettily that, in the sunshine, you’d nearly believe you were overseas - until Haulbowline Naval Base enters the crosshairs.

The couple was very sure of which rooms they wanted to open, via double doors, onto the south-facing terrace: the dining/living room, where serious entertaining took place, and the main bedroom, so that the first thing they saw in the morning was the glint of water.

Both of these rooms, on the uppermost floor, have vaulted, beamed ceilings, a mezzanine and glazed, harbour-facing walls. There’s a His and Her walk-in closet and an ensuite off the main bedroom too and this mezzanine was used as a home office, while the other was used for storage.

Tahilla was an ideal house for dinner parties, Gráinne says, and there were many, as John’s passion was music. Guests could segue from the dining/living room to the terrace and enjoy the harbour lights at night.

John was a romantic too and Gráinne recalls a Valentine’s Night that didn’t go quite as planned but still won them the title of Most Romantic Couple in Ireland. She thought they were going to a local restaurant but instead John, who was dressed for dinner, led her up the garden path, literally, to a garden shed, where a table was set up with ice-bucket, champagne, lobster, candles, table cloth, background music. No sooner had they settled in, when their son arrived home with a stranger in tow who ended up joining them in the shed.

“She was the mother of a girl our son was seeing and she was collecting her daughter, so John ended up bringing her in for tea,” Gráinne says. They laughed about it afterwards and when Gráinne’s sister retold the story on the Marian Finucane Show, they ended up winning the title of Ireland’s Most Romantic Couple.

If Gráinne and music were John’s two main passions, gardening was his third. “He loved the look of the jungle,” she says, and there’s certainly a sense of lush, big-leafed growth around the house.

Access to Tahilla from Lake Road is up a steep drive, with parking at the top and an electric car charger. Beyond the drive, a row of towering pines borders whitewashed/red tiled Mediterranean-style steps that run up the side of the house, and lead around to the rear where a grassy passageway is enclosed by a whitewashed wall, with a pretty plant nook at one end.

Halfway down the grassy passage is the front door, and beyond it, the garden proper starts, with a pond built by John, designed to keep the giant-leaved Gunnera happy. As well as a talented guitarist, John was quite the handyman, demonstrated by lots of nice outdoor features, including a second pond at a lower level, in an outdoor courtyard off the main kitchen/living space.

He also built a raised fireplace in the main dining room. Their son JP is creative too, Gráinne says, and is currently renovating the ground floor of her dental practice in Roger Casement Square, in Cobh town centre, with his partner Claire O’Regan, turning it into a wine bar, called The Arch, taking its name from a former Cobh cinema which was run by the Frenett family, whose roots can be traced to French Canada.

“John’s great grandfather was a ship’s captain who used to sail between Quebec and Cobh,” Gráinne says.

The Frenett men were/are enterprising and adventurous and John’s house design is adventurous too. “It’s upside down, back to front and inside out,” says Gráinne of their split level home, where whitewashed brickwork is a common theme indoors; where the front door is at the rear and where the bedrooms are at lower levels. At the lowest level is the main kitchen/dining/living space, where a Graham Knuttel collage of a mandolin hangs over the fireplace.

The couple bought it when they spotted it in, a Wicklow restaurant, right before Knuttel’s career took off.

“We paid €125 for it and Bono bought another of his works and I got a note from Graham afterwards to say he had been about to give up, but the €125 changed things for him,” Gráinne says.

Gráinne, a cosmetic and general dentist in Cobh, says you won’t find another house like Tahilla in Cobh. “It was ahead of its time,” she says.

It does need work though, and this is acknowledged by the selling agent Johanna Murphy of Johanna Murphy & Sons. A two-storey garden room is in a fairly raw state internally, but that may suit new owners who can finish it out as they please. The main house will need a decorative overhaul too. But one thing that needs no tweaking is the view.

“It’s an ideal property for the person who is seeking the panoramic harbour view, it doesn’t get much better than this,” says Ms Murphy, who is guiding the 195 sq m house at €395,000.

Moreover, the location is excellent, she says, less than a 10 minute walk to the train station and the town centre. Trains between Cobh and Cork City are regular, handy for families with school-going kids (four boys were reared at Tahilla).