Top period home, top Blackrock setting, top A2 BER for 230 year old Riverside: yours for €1.65m, give or take

Castle Road 1790s home is future-proofed for any fortunate family

Sat, 27 May, 2023 - 00:00

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures John Roche

Castle Road Blackrock, Cork
€1.65m
Size	283 sqm (3,000 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	4
BER	A2

GETTING only lovelier as the years roll by is Cork city’s genteel Castle Road, home to a beguiling mix of period homes, some high and mighty like the lofty Italianate couple, Eastcliffe and Pinehurst, near Blackrock village, others low-slung such as the bay windowed Bayswater and Riverside at the Blackrock Castle end, with the latter home, Riverside, surprisingly seen back here today.

It’s only five years since the romance-dripping Riverside last featured in these pages, selling well at the time, now set to do even better.

Sunny dining room to the rear with roof light

In fact, it’s heading up to twice the price it last sold for, in 2018.

When it was a summer ’18 arrival, Riverside had carried a €695,000 AMV for its owners at the time, medics who’d been here a couple of decades, and it was clear that despite its charms, the buxom and bow-fronted old dear required a bit more than cosmetic attention and lift.

Back garden is large, with mews at the far end and second access off a cul de sac lane

It was bid to a recorded €875,000; was acquired by another professional couple, younger with medicine also in their backgrounds, and a willingness to engage with a period home overhaul and engaging engineers, architects and builders to a considerable degree, possibly more than they had first bargained for.

But, look at what they got in return?

Despite superficial first appearances from its full-height double bow facade glimpsed past its discrete electric gates held on slender fluted limestone pillars bearing the name Riverside, it’s not quite the same house.

Not at all.

Now about 230 years of age, Riverside gets a remarkable A2 BER: that’s a truly extraordinary energy rating for a historic late 18th century home, and can only have been achieved by a thorough series of upgrades, but all sensitively done.

It includes insulation par excellence, new energy efficient sash windows, air to water heating delivered under floor at ground level, finishing internal and external walls with breathable lime render, energy efficient appliances and lighting.

Surprisingly, its newly-enlarged main central entry hall inside the old-world entry porch with its Doric columns, crowning entablature and slender glazed outer doors which retain the patina of age and wear on the floor includes a tall, ornate vintage reconditioned Scandinavian cast iron stove:

this pride of place piece, Danish, was sourced via Mill Stores in Connonagh, West Cork (previously Ovne). It immediately sets the tone for a hideaway city home that’s both comfortable and efficient, and all quietly transformed.

Riverside’s all set up for decades, if not centuries more to come of creature comforts for its next fortunate inhabitants, a truly charming home, in an exceptional Leeside setting.

Looking east towards Castle Road from Blackrock village

Given the already proven allure and cachet of Cork’s Blackrock district, and Castle Road in particular, it’s likely to be one of this year’s most coveted offers at the upper end of the southern capital’s house market, kindly treated and with kudos aplenty.

It’s fresh this week to market with agents Ann O’Mahony and Stuart O’Grady of Sherry FitzGerald with its €1.65m AMV, with career moves which were unforeseen as recently as five years ago taking the home’s vendors and their young children out of Cork.

Main bedroom with graceful bow window and water views beyond

They’ve done all the hard work, clearly spent heavily, and should get the dividend for passing on this period home with its asymmetric front and back aspects and interior quirks and triumphs in its pristine condition.

Buyers could conceivably come from just about any quarter: local families with money in hand, relocators back from Dublin or London or further afield who want a walk-in order home that’s not ‘off the shelf/generic,’ and yet gets a top A2 BER, or from any other profile, and they are likely to be buying for the long-term.

In addition to Riverside’s near 3,000 sq ft of perfectly realised space and delightfully non-standard rooms, it has private gardens front and back which have been planted and minded for decades.

Money just doesn’t buy this maturity, or planting, which includes lawns, and covers of trees and shrubs including acers, birch, cherry blossom, cornus, magnolia as well as raised herb vegetable beds and frames for climbers.

It’s the passing of time and the seasons, and as importantly, care, and not upending in pursuit of ephemeral garden trends.

Then, there’s double access to this end-terrace one-off, with Riverside set at the end of a row of six or seven all individual period homes (rugby’s Peter O’Mahony lives nearby) with a leafy lane running behind them.

In this case, the near-private lane ends at Riverside’s uber-mature back boundary, with another electric gate for controlled access, a coach-house/mews building used for storage and with a gym alongside, and there’s a vegetable garden with glasshouse, all in the most sheltered and secure of settings, and all within a riverside amble of cafes, at the castle, or at the pier, with its Saturday market.

Sherry FitzGerald’s Ann O’Mahony is more than a bit smitten by this one, and professionally describes this prime-set listing as “an imposing 1790s Georgian home, sensitively refurbished and modernised in recent years to the highest of standards,” noting it’s set at just about the highest point on Castle Road, with River Lee, Tivoli and hill-crowning Montenotte views to the front.

Although Georgian, there’s an utter imbalance or asymmetry to its layout, with the formal front entrance its only opening to the north, while the private world to the back has no less than six access points to the sunny south-facing back garden and large stone sun terrace and sitting area by a classic sun room with glazed room light, bespoke, by Precision Quality Glass.

Those sundry access points range from the super-useful boot room off the kitchen (with dog flap in the door), with a set of double doors off the large L-shaped kitchen; two sets of double doors feature in the sunroom, opening south and west; another set is in the double aspect main living room with original white marble fireplace, and, finally, there’s one more door in the end double aspect study, to the west, butting up to the home next door, and all but out of

sight and, effectively, out of the picture. If Riverside is semi-detached, or end-of-terrace, it’s not as you’d ever know it: it’s very much its own house.

Architect initially behind the subtle and effective transformation and conservation is Cork city-based Niamh Marum, and work on the ground was done by conservation builders, Wild Atlantic Way Construction, with engineer DJ Lucey getting it all together and up to a high spec in terms of services, supports and even Category 5 high-speed fibre power internet throughout. There’s wiring for electric vehicle chargers front and back (when the Irish Examiner visited, an even more eco-friendly cargo bike, with electric power assist, for ferrying smaller children was in evident use.)

When we last visited, in 2018, we said the rooms ranged from the magic to the mundane. Well mundanity has been all but banished, with both fun and functional alterations made to layouts and numerous ‘clever touches’. They include the boot room, an upgraded ground floor bathroom with rainfall shower and marble floor, a pantry off the kitchen, with sliding glazed pocket doors which thanks to the decision to use glass keep a visual connection even when closed to the main cooking/eating activity area.

Adults will love these life-easing adjuncts either side of the kitchen, but children will be utterly entranced by a connecting feature between two of the smaller bedrooms.

These two front-facing rooms are side by side with a very thick wall dividing: now, there’s a doorway linking/separating, each with hinged deep bookcases filling the door frames. Simply pull back the book cases and a child (or, anyone else) can go from room to room through this secret link. Magic, indeed.

Secret 'passage' behind hinged bookcases

Riverside’s first floor has four bedrooms in all, off a wide slightly split landing, but this reporter has a faint recall of a visit some 30 years ago when it may have had a second stairs off to the left with ‘servant’ quality rooms on the left, and a memory that it sold at that time for £110,000, long before Price Register transparency days.

Owner way back then was a surgeon, a Mr Hobart, at the Royal Victoria Hospital, related to the late art collector Hugh Lane, and at that time it was a house of two halves, and high hopes.

All hopes are now fully-realised, in its second 21st century market iteration, with three comfortable bedrooms on the eastern end with one en suite, with a very useful first floor laundry room concealed behind hinged doors, meaning no running upstairs, and downstairs, with bed linen chores. Servant days are banished here, indeed.

Every room has an appeal; interventions include electric Veluxes over one high-ceilinged bedroom in utter contrast to the tiniest of windows in a back wall like a secret peephole to the gardens and sun terrace, and many windows have conserved and functioning shutters, along with sliding sash windows.

The soft, slightly uneven lime render internally is a feature, while other finishes include solid oak engineered flooring with 7mm veneer, geocell permeable ground insulation, isomer stud wall insulation, lead coverings to some flat roof sections, plus slate (Riverside is a protected structure) but still stood voluntarily up for a BER.

Appliances are by Fisher & Paykel and include a dual drawer dishwasher, Fisher and Paykel range stove and US-style fridge, all new electrics, double glazed windows & doors to the rear, quality fitted kitchen and bathrooms.

Plumbing and bathrooms are all new, as are electrics. Air to water heating is zoned, yet all the interventions and upgrades appear unobtrusive in the extreme, almost as if it was ever thus, ever so comfortable.

VERDICT: Visited this month, for the third time in nearly 30 years, on its 2023 market arrival, a trawl of archives show the last three owners of Riverside have all been medics.

Now, it’s in such good rude health, it’s like it has taken a deep draught of some A-2 BER alchemy Elixir of Life. Live on.