Kinsale's €535k stylish No 9 Ferryview Cottages is a 10 for sure

Bidders expected to go hell for leather for bag designer Dee Madden's turn-key fisherman's cottage

Get on yer bike for 9 Ferryview Cottages,  Kinsale. The charmer is for sale with Gobnait O'Connell of Engel  & Volkers with a €535,000 AMV

Kinsale, Cork
€535,000
Size	85 sq m (910 sq ft)
Bedrooms	2
Bathrooms	2
BER	C2

LONG before Kinsale became known for gourmet food, for multi-million euro mansions, mad-priced maisonettes, chi-chi shops, chopper-borne golfers, and rugby sevens fans and festivities, it was a fishing port and a home for two 17th century forts.

Waterside setting for 9 Ferryview Cottages

It’s moved on, as evidenced by a certain un-Irish radiance in the sunshine, and property values are among the country’s highest.

Main living area 

Thankfully, not everything with comfort, charm, and a view is €1m-plus: Take No 9 Ferryview Cottages for starters and, hey, it even keeps faith with Kinsale’s long and lucrative fishing and sea-angling past.

Lofty look to No 9

Cast your net, because No 9 has hit the market, floated at €535,000 and already under offer at the asking: given it’s in walk-in it order, packed with punch and style and with water, marina and fort views, it will go more, surely?

Deft hand with interiors

Worked on from the front to the back, and from the top to the bottom, well-set No 9 is at World’s End, a stone’s toss from the water and a five minute-walk from the quays and marina, and has been has been home to Dee Madden.

Extended to the back

Dee grew up locally, around the harbour, has retail in her family blood in Cork City and has a savvy eye for design: she has run her own award-winning business, Kinsale Leather, since 2015, employing three, with a shop on Kinsale’s Main Street, and doing the bulk of business now online.

She has been at No 9 Ferrview Cottages since 2016, initially renting the cosy terraced perch, and later buying it (c 2020), reconfiguring it inside, extending and upgrading it.

Top floor has a bedroom with bathroom and dressing area, with water views from the Velux windows

With its cool and quirky ‘Scandi-chic’ look, which is emphasised more by vintage pieces, it may seem familiar to those who like to look at lovely things.

Bath had to be craned in!

It got a sizeable pictorial and editorial spread in Image magazine in winter 2021, picking up both on Dee’s high-end craft business (bags, and scents, mostly) and interior design nous, and she’s also worked on houses in the Kinsale area for others and who’ve given her free rein to source quality materials.

Here, at home, it’s moving-on time for Dee and her two young daughters, Ruby and Penny, as there are hopes of a place out of town with outdoors space, with scope for a studio for Kinsale Leather. That hunt is on.

Second from the western end of a terrace of 10 former fishermen’s cottages, No 9 is listed with agent Gobnait O’Connell, of Engel & Volkers, with a €535,000 AMV, and got an offer at the asking price in its first few days of viewings, last week.

There’s already precedent for buyers at this level, and above, at this setting. E&V had No 6 with a €395,000AMV two years back, a differently configured house, a three-bed, albeit similarly-sized.

No 6 soared to a recorded sale price of €542,000, possibly with the pandemic driving the demand for it, but the price bar has been set.

Ferryview Cottages looks over the River Bandon in Kinsale's inner harbour to the Dock, a marina and  Castlepark

The well-regarded Kinsale builder Brian Keohane was drafted in for the extension, rejigging the interiors, doing it all in two and a half months, in the gaps between Covid-19 lockdowns, says an impressed owner Dee.

It’s likely to have been among the smaller jobs he’s tacked down the years (things are large and luxe in Kinsale) and the finished entity is put at 85 sq m or just over 900 sq ft, all of them lovely, and as engaging to the eye are the views out the upright living area and ground-floor bedroom windows.

Seen outside is the tidal inner harbour section, often graced by seals, the ebb and flow of boating, James Fort, over the River Bandon at Castlepark, Fisherman’s Pontoon, marina and, up and slightly down river, piers.

Second from the end: No 10 next door has had major extension work done

The neighbourly, unobstructed Ferryview Cottages terrace of 10 is near the larger, newer builds of Viking Wharf, with the adjoining, end-terrace No 10 now significantly extended with a contemporary add-on.

The row is mostly free from parking in front (locals know where to find the good spots, Dee hints lightly, as her push bike, green like her windows, rests outside the front wall, ready for the off.)

Sitting outside in the view is a given, while there’s also a private, planted-up courtyard behind, green-in and with space for outdoor seating/dining.

Good depth and double aspect

In between, the home is finished with solid-oak herringbone pattern flooring in the main at ground level, with a bedroom on the immediate right side of the glazed, central front door.

Left is a living room, part-screened with a short wall section facing a chimney hearth with stove, and comfiest seating is between, on a large corner sofa, “a bit of an unusual one, it’s a 1950’s Danish design. I got it reupholstered in France and shipped over. So a bit mad, but I love it,” says Dee.

The good-sized open living room also fits in a piano, display spaces and staircase, with nautical-style tensioned steel under a stainless steel handrail, with a ground-floor guest WC and shower room to the side.

An open, connecting arch links to the rear, double-aspect kitchen, now extended with two overhead Veluxes and tall windows under each, and the new kitchen with flush (handleless) birch-ply finishes was made by local Riverstick firm, Cullen View.

Key to the home’s success for day-to-day living is the tucked-away utility/pantry off the kitchen (in place of a former ground-floor bedroom, which would have been left windowless after the kitchen was added, and it’s a small masterclass in ergonomic design for laundry, storage and more storage…the owner admits to a neatness gene.

Hardwood stairs lead to the first floor, full-width main bedroom, flooded with light, with feature-exposed white-painted brick and stone party walls to the neighbours either side, and the floor is Chinese oak, sanded right back and dyed with a Danish brand product, WOCA.

There’s eaves storage and the en suite to the back has a real find, which never would have featured in any of these former fishmen’s homes, a capacious, deep, roll-top cast-iron bath.

Clearly well-travelled, the bath was sourced in Co Meath, and has ‘Waterford Ireland’ stamped on its taps: “I love it, but it had to be craned in through the window,” Dee says.

So, the bath is staying put, post-sale, but the kitchen’s Ercol, drop-leaf kitchen table, the ‘red dot’ favourite spot (as you can see thought the living room to the view from it) will go.

Granny's table at No 9

“The kitchen table was my Granny’s, and seven people in St Luke’s ate at it every day at one point, about 60 years ago, and is very sentimental.

“I can vividly remember eating dinner at it with my cousins when I was only about four,” Dee Madden says.

“One of the things I love about the cottage is how safe it is. There’s a real sense of community amongst the 10. If someone forgets their bin, it gets put out by someone else… post never gets left outside in the rain, we all look out for one another.

“It’s so close to town, but yet it’s quiet, and the view of the marina in the morning sun is something that you can’t really buy. Although, I suppose someone will, hopefully,” Dee quips.

VERDICT: Best of good in a no-so-small Kinsale parcel. Will the bidding go hell for leather?