Auctioneer duo Victoria and Johanna Murphy team up for €3m unique home in Kinsale

1990s Joaney's Garden is as full of quirks and personality as its owner, South African-born Victoria Murphy

What a setting: Joaney's Garden was built in a prime Compass Hill setting 30 years ago, designed by Kinsale architect Richard Rainey for his sister Victoria  Murphy.

Compass Hill, Kinsale
€3m
Size	220 sq m (2,400 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	Pending

YES, in anyone’s book €3m is lot to spend on a house.

Room with  view: only in Kinsale...

So is €2m. As is €1m for the vast majority of us. Even half a million euro is well above the national Irish house price, sitting at around €300,000, give or take, right now.

But, in the case of a place like Kinsale, you can throw the rule book and the national average out the window.

View to Joaney's Garden on Compass Hill (centre of pic) from Castlepark via drone

And, at this house, Joaney’s Garden, sort of a Georgian-inspired home with local architectural references via South African influences, you could throw the whole pricing guide kit and caboodle out the generous bay windows at either of its two levels at “price averages”.

Drop in the ocean? The boat Scout in the view from €3m Joaney's Garden is said to be worth €80m

Not only is this premium-priced property in an acknowledged Kinsale setting, on the crown of Compass Hill but you never quite know who’s going to rock up underneath it, drop anchor and perhaps consider a property price purchase along the southern coastline.

Case in point, this being Kinsale and all that?

When the Irish Examiner visited Joaney’s Garden on Saturday last, tied up in full view of this fresh-to-market property launch was a superyacht called Scout, a 209ft long (64m) superyacht owned by a US man, James Berwind, whose family fortune came from coal mining.

It was one of two super-sized boats to visit Kinsale this month, following hot on the wake of the even larger 360ft (110m), €300m Kaos linked to Nancy Walton Laurie, heiress to the Walmart US retail empire.

Take the plunge?

Kaos went on to visit Seapoint off the coast at Dublin, getting national media headlines, as well as going up North, but its Kinsale arrival didn’t manage to make quite the same media waves... this being Kinsale, and all that, used to displays of exceptional wealth? In fact, Kaos was so large, it had to anchor off Charles Fort and not come in the harbour past far lesser craft!

Victoriana!

Berwind is said to be worth $500m, and the local Kinsale rumour factory (never short of material, truth be damned) at the weekend had it that he may have been using the visit to check out some truly prime waterfront properties, by helicopter.

Berwind and his partner spend considerable time on their boat, sharing it with dogs Scout (yes, the boat is called after the pooch) and Brio, having had it built in 2019 at a reported cost of €80m and saying they planned largely to live on it for a number of years and to get acquainted with “the British Isles” and other spots as they explore the world.

Did they spot Joaney’s Garden via their spyglasses (centre of main pic, above?)

The boat certainly was the view of the day from this house where, not entirely coincidentally, its owner also is widely travelled, rocking up in Cork in the late 1960s from her native South Africa, and staying put ever since.

Joaney’s Garden is the private home of the very well-known auctioneer Victoria Murphy, just very recently retired having worked up to the covid pandemic, primarily in Kinsale, just after her own mother passed away aged 98 years and as she herself approaches her 80th birthday.

Larger than life, ever-focused and determined, and a doughty, direct speaker, Victoria Murphy calls it as she sees it.

Original site of 0.3 acre has been enlarged to 0.75 acre, and Joaney's Garden has been added to to now stand at 2,400 sq ft

Others might call it “unfiltered”, and it wouldn’t faze her in the slightest. Her reproach to a professional auctioneers’ institute in the 1990s for not electing her to national council is the stuff of legend. “The perfume of testosterone,” was how she started her broadside to the then-men’s club: The rest is largely unprintable.

Victoria Murphy’s property sales brochures “back in the day” were also things of legend, barely bothering with prosaic facts like size and square footage, going for purple prose, or tangential details, many of them resulting in sizeable sales.

Curtains included

One description was recalled by Victoria with typical trilling laughter on our visit: “I said whoever buys the house should just knock it, but they should keep the curtains...”

Victoria built Joaney’s Garden on a near-impossible site she bought after a previous sale fell through with planning indicated only for a small house.

When it came to building, she (not entirely unexpectedly) did “push the envelope”, so while a small house was always going to get planning, Victoria managed (in the end) to get permission for a larger build on her steep-sloping site, now 0.75 of an acre.

That was largely achieved by going down, digging and reinforcing with enormous concrete groundworks, having a discrete lower ground floor, and a scenery-stealing upper floor. A number of years after it put down roots, it got modest gable end extensions, one for a dressing room on the eastern end, the other for glazed, twin bays at the western end, off the kitchen as a sunroom and breakfast room — all now planning compliant as it comes to market.

It was all delivered low key, under the level of the public road above, the scenic circular route out from Kinsale’s chi-chi Compass Hill, ringing around to open up river Bandon and Commogue marsh views before dropping back down into the venerable, historic harbour-set top tourist town once more.

Entrance from parking area seems modest, and is set below road height on landscaped gardens

The crown of Compass Hill is occupied by a contemporary large home, Constantia Farm, bought over a year ago by a Munster businessman who subsequently bought a second land lot (zoned) alongside spending c €10m combined on his Kinsale eyrie, now totalling 30 acres and with significant future value.

At Joaney’s Garden, Victoria Murphy used the design service and nous of her architect brother Richard Rainey, and the dig-down design solution they got on the vertiginous site to allow Joaney’s Garden get to a reasonable size has become increasingly common in Kinsale and elsewhere, with knock-downs increasingly the norm and where real value in today’s monied world lies in the site, setting, and views, rather than in mere bricks as they’ve stood to date.

Also Kinsale-based, Richard Rainey had followed sister Victoria to Ireland years after her arrival on Munster shores: She’d met an Irish man, then a chief engineer on a ship, in South Africa, and came back to Cork with him “as a child bride”, with the couple having two daughters, Johanna, an auctioneer, and Rachel, an actor (ex Fair City) and now also an auctioneer.

Victoria set up her estate agency business in the heart of Kinsale, where she also had an antiques business, with the word “ANTIQUES” painted on the building roof in large white letters, to planners’ chagrin, that only eased as the paint faded.

Her business traded as Victoria Murphy & Daughter long before Johanna got the sales bug, and she briefly moved to live in Cobh in a classic period building, The Manse, before getting the yen to return to Kinsale.

Agent Johanna Murphy and her mother Victoria Murphy at Joaney's Garden

Chip off the block daughter Johanna later set up her own Cobh-based business, Johanna Murphy & Sons, back when her boys were babes and apart from having the inherited genetic drive and directness, is also the former president of the Cobh Chamber of Commerce and advocate for that harbour town’s attractions.

“I tell you, in 10 years’ time, you won’t be able to afford a good house in Cobh,” Johanna Murphy predicts, possibly after gaining some considerable Kinsale market and values insights in her formative years. She didn’t lick it off the stones....

Mother and daughter, Victoria

and Johanna, have already appeared together in a guest slot on RTÉ’s Selling Ireland’s Dream Homes, Johanna with several various Munster listings, along with ‘’guest’ Victoria in the case of the sale of a large Scilly rebuild called Ocean Breeze, a listing which came from a former client of Victoria’s, about two years ago.

Ocean Breeze had a €5m price tag, high //(even for Kinsale), and sold last year for between €4m and €5m (not yet on the Price Register), and was bought by Nike heir Travis Knight and his Co Laois-born wife Maryse, after being attracted to Kinsale and, reportedly, being disappointed on another property they’d espied.

Launching Joaney’s Garden with a €3m price guide (“Say excess €3m, can you?” interjects Victoria optimistically, when they animatedly discuss the sale details of her home) and donning her professional sales hat Johanna says “how it is laid out is very clever, in fact, as it is a house that can grow with you throughout your stages in life.”

It’s a four-bed home with three bedrooms at the lower level, one of them en suite and with service/storage rooms and laundry backing into the darker rear, sheathed in reinforcing concrete: two of those bedrooms share a bathroom in a Jack and Jill arrangement, with the smaller one to the back and getting its light through a frosted-glass door from the wash room.

Joaney's Garden: breakfast room was added on

The upper floor rooms were built in timber frame (again, unusually enough for the early 1990s) and all of this level’s rooms have access to the outdoors and landscaped gardens, wrap-around patios and tiered beds and viewing terraces.

The design brief Victoria gave her brother was to fashion her a “timeless” bespoke home along Georgian villa or lodge lines, with a slate-hung exterior — with slate being very much a vernacular external finish, and topped with a slate roof, while glazing has recently been upgraded throughout, with new, robust double glazed units and access doors from Munster Joinery.

IT’S entered via a small, stone-floored vestibule, into an oak-floored hall with views opening via hardwood double doors right through to the main drawing room, about 20ft wide and 14ft deep, pushing into the bay window with magnificent views unfurling beyond.

It’s pretty much a truism that the best views and highest property values in Kinsale are either from the Scilly/Ardbrack/Summercove ridge on the harbour’s eastern shoulder, or else from Compass Hill toward the west.

Here, the vista from this elevated Compass Hill perch is down over a new small marina and working pier for fishing craft just upriver of the Trident Hotel, over the inner harbour/river Bandon to Castlepark, its cove, spanning James Fort and out to the outer harbour and towards Summercove and Charles Fort in the further, harbour mouth distance.

Joaney's Garden is by the top of Compass Hill: the land at Constantia Farm where €10m has been spent is behind, on the crown of the hill with the modern house almost hidden by trees

The forts have been here for centuries, an essential part of Kinsale’s built fabric, while since Joaney’s Garden was built much else seen from up here has changed, including the arrival of the Viking Wharf underneath to the marinas and pier, with the value of many of the craft in the view worth more than the average Irish house price.

It is truly a 180-degree panorama when standing in the window bays, not dissimilar to being on a ship’s bridge, or out on the patios and various outdoor seating areas, and vendor Victoria says she loves the fact her view just about avoids sight of the blocks of apartments at Ardbrack Heights on the one side, and the bridge upriver on the other. “I think it has one of the best sites on Compass Hill,” she argues.

Terrace

The house’s name comes from days of yore, when this area of Kinsale had various named wells for water, such as Fiddler’s Well, O’Leary’s Well, and Joaney’s Well, and according to local historical accounts the woman after which it was named had a garden also up here on this height.

Interior-wise, this c 2,400 sq ft home has quality materials, some of them salvaged from older and period properties for the look and feel and character, with hardwood joinery and some hardwood panelling, chandeliers, elaborate drapes, epergnes, gilt mirrors, coved ceilings and plasterwork, fine furniture and artefacts from previous centuries, continents and travels, much of it which made its way from South Africa.

Other rooms include a main bedroom with en suite, a plush home office, a dressing room with patio access, a dining room with columns and patio door, a kitchen with linked breakfast room, and a sunroom with more patio/terrace access via the kitchen end.

It’s all a busy look — the owner doesn’t do minimalism, clearly — and agent/daughter Johanna diplomatically says that “‘elegance’ and ‘flair with a difference’ are the words to capture the essence of the house,” and adds that the exterior slate blends it in so it is very much at home in its locale.

Among the unusual finds and trove are two large, freestanding carved angels, sourced years back from the Mercy Convent Kinsale and quite ecumenically at ease in Victoria’s home, with one standing sentinel by a cast iron, roll top bath in the main en suite, with murals painted on the wall by local artist Kevin Sanquest back in the 1990s.

Given the design brief day one was for a period look home that wouldn’t age, it’s not surprising the house hasn’t itself barely dated.

“I changed nothing in 30 years, it looks exactly as it did back then,” says Victoria truthfully, as images taken back in the mid-1990s for a spread in interior design magazine House & Home testify, right down the bathroom’s angel.

Then, she thinks for moment and adds: “Well I did take down the net curtains, that was the only ‘modernising’ I did,” laughs the woman who, let it be recalled from above, wrote a sales description of a client’s house that buyers should flatten it, but keep the curtains.

VERDICT: Larger than life, and colourful, a bit like its owner.