If life gives you limas? Top notch €795k Lima Lawn made-over home is a peach

Well-set inner suburban Cork semi-d gone from 1,000 sq ft to almost 3,000 sq ft

Fri, 15 Sep, 2023 - 13:00

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures Niamh Whitty

Magazine Road Cork City
€795,000
Size	277 sq m (2980 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	5-
BER	B1

OUR family homes can be for life, or they can be for a time in a family’s life: the owners of 9 Lima Lawn sort of straddle both camps.

The couple who reworked Cork city’s old, settle suburban 9 Lima Lawn from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side had previous building experience, having built from scratch in Curra Woods, Riverstick, between the city/airport and Kinsale back about 15 years ago.

With their children — a daughter and a son — coming up on secondary school years (and, coming across as quite strategic thinkers), they decided to move to the city to be closer to schools they were choosing, as well as to third-level college, to cut out on commutes.

They saw and seized their opportunity at Lima Lawn, within a kilometre of University College Cork (UCC) off Magazine Road and near Glasheen Road, in a quiet backwater section of Lima Lawn which had come to market in 2015, with a €295,000 AMV.

Then, it has been the long-term home of a man who’d done some work to it over his decades at No 9, but it was all very much “of its time”. When it appeared for sale and mentioned in these pages we noted “a key feature in this home’s case is the wide and wedge-shaped site it stands on, easily allowing lots of scope for a sizeable side extension, and garden left over. Its upstairs bathroom has been modernised and it has a guest WC under the stairs; its kitchen is compact and basic, but could at a minimum easily be extended back into the attached side garage.”

Well, the potential that was hinted on them was seized on, with gusto, by the buyers.

The Price Register shows they paid €307,000 by early 2016 for what was then a three-bed semi-d, of about 1,000 sq ft (93 sq m), drawn by the location’s convenience and the quietness of its exact position inside Lima Lawn, where there’s a cluster of six pairs of semi-ds arranged around a central block — back garden to back garden — with deep hedge boundaries between many of them.

No 9, on its wedge or triangle-shaped site has a south aspect to the rear and wide front boundary, where there’s now sliding electric gate access to an off-street parking area, paved in the main with planting to the screening boundary.

Front drive, off-street parking and CCTV

They worked with the input of Grenagh-based Dan O’Brien Architectural Services, to-ing and fro-ing between them for a finished product to look at ease with its next door “other half” neighbour and others in the enclave. Meanwhile, across the quiet circling road is a more diverse cluster, with one or two large one-off homes, built in the early 2000s as the mid-1900s-built Lima Lawn picked up a pace of renewal.

The most recent Lima Lawn sale is of a bungalow called Rosemary, making a recorded €675,000 by July 2023, pretty much as a site (of c 0.3 acre) for a one-off new home, it appears.

The Register also shows 10 other Lima Lawn resales since No 9 last changed hands in 2016: The most recent being No 14 at €715,000 earlier in 2023, and No 35 in 2020 at €625,000 — two of the strongest prices to date at this location.

Now, they are going to go up another notch and quite possibly by quite a bit over any and all of late.

The fully reworked, now B1-rated No 9 (it used to be a F) comes to market with estate agent Sean McCarthy of ERA Downey McCarthy, who guides at €795,000, and it’s likely to make that and quite a bit more.

Why? Well, the location has only grown further in appeal, given proximity to the city centre, major employment centres like UCC, Cork University Hospital, Bon Secours, schools, shops and every other service as well as to the Lee Fields for outdoor recreation, ramped up quite a few notches in appeal since the global pandemic as a green/blue lung.

Next, there’s the size and quality of what’s on offer at No 9.

It’s gone from c 93 sq m/1,000 sq ft with old, attached garage, to almost treble that at 227 sq m/2,980 sq ft thanks to a side, rear and upwards extension. It has five/six bedrooms inside, with bed options over all three floors — all fully planning and building regulation compliant.

That compliance achievement is unusual enough in many an upgrade to a “traditional” mid-1900s home — whether detached or a semi-d — and must have taken some tweaking to get such approved access to the top floor and get attic rooms and a bathroom up there so neatly.

It was all done without going higher than the existing roofline, while the side extension is slightly set back from the main/original facade, now all re-rendered, painted a pleasant green and with sliding sash windows pretty much throughout (triple glazed and supplied by Munster Joinery who also did doors etc, helping hit the significantly improved B1 BER and thus allowing access to reduced green rate mortgages for next owners/occupiers).

Builders were R&W Construction, and also on board were Pat Roche of City Tile and Bathrooms and skilled joiner Victor Brown who did the new stairs in mahogany, with “monkey tail” end to the banister in the hall and slight splay to a bull-nosed lower step as a special hall feature, with a French polished rail.

Elements of the decor range from the classical — such as that polished mahogany, deep ceiling coving, tall 9” skirtings, wall wood-paneling etc — to more contemporary and modern, such as in the services with central comms services, Thermo solar panels, remoted control access, alarm/CCTV, sanitary ware/bathrooms, etc.

The painted kitchen is by Cash & Carry, with quartz tops, Quooker tap, Rangemaster oven and high-end appliances, plus a wine cooler, with the units built in-frame: That latter choice for units was indicative of the fact the owners planned this as a home for life and the long-term when they got ready to roll up their sleeves in 2016 and 2017.

“We wouldn’t ever have moved except for this other house coming up,” says one of the owners, an accountant with long experience in the hospitality/hotels sector and thus, not surprisingly, with a good eye for comfort, and a welcoming environment.

The house they’ve just bought, 1 Millfield, is close-by, as well located (in fact, even quieter in a tiny cul de sac) and “just happens” to be bigger (3,300 sq ft,) architect-designed, detached and even better (A2) rated, and was built in 2017 on a 0.3-acre site. “I used to see the scaffolding on the site as it was being built and we loved it.” When that other unexpectedly came for sale in July of this year, at about twice the price of No 9, the couple (she’s an accountant, he’s an electrical engineer) just couldn’t resist. They’ve jumped and already bought in jig-time, but the deal has yet to appear on the Price Register.

What they’ve bought is arguably one of the best contemporary houses built in Cork in many years, and the family was fortunate to be in a position to snap it up, repeating they really had not ever expected to be moving from No 9 otherwise.

No 9 Lima Lawn really is in walk-in condition, inside and outside is pristine and in fact barely shows signs of having been a much-appreciated family home for the past six years, with the oldest child just about to start on the third-level journey having loved the secondary school years here, making a high-grade course not as might have been expected in nearby UCC, but in London.

Buyers for No 9 could come from far, or wide, from London as returning Irish, or as traders up, or traders in, as its departing owners were.

For next occupiers, the fact there’s not a thing to be touched, bar maybe a discretionary choice of colour or furnishing, has to be a huge plus. A time of continuing inflated construction/renovation cost and skills shortages, even if the pressure is finally starting to ease just a tad, after a turbulent year or two and ongoing ripples.

The layout today in its far larger guise sees an optional fifth/sixth bedroom at ground level off an L-shaped refashioned entry hall, with a sitting room to the right, with bay window, herringbone-style parquet floor and open fireplace with Deco-style white marble chimneypiece.

Behind, to the left off the hall and optional bedroom is a large utility, and straight through from the hall, via glazed double doors, is the now-extended kitchen/living/dining, with an integrated wood-burning stove, with timber log storage on either side in a slip-stone chimney breast.

The kitchen continues with the upmarket, solid timber herringbone parquet floor, and quite unusually the sloping ceiling of the extended area continues the deep plaster coving seen in the “straight” section of the room (main pic, above): a roof light in the ceiling makes sure the deep room is kept light and bright.

A large, sliding door connects this airy space to a rear patio/sun terrace, with Portuguese limestone base, and planting (including a tree fern) along a low Kilkenny limestone wall done “dry stone” style, and the back boundary is in cedar sheeting.

After exten

sion, there’s now more perhaps more indoor floor area than outdoor leftover space, so what might have been a tiny lawn is now finished in Astroturf, as is a “notionally” green patch on the front left by the paved drive.

Back inside, the mid-level splits left and right off the new staircase, with Ulster runner carpet, and the main bedroom is off to the left, with en suite and room-sized walk-in wardrobes, while over on the other side are two more bedrooms, one in front, the other to the back and each have en suite bathrooms.

The second floor has a bedroom with a Velux and a further en suite bathroom with shower, while the top level has a further room, for uses as a study, playroom, or home office. Thus,so No 9 has work/sleeping options from top to bottom and scope for up to six bedrooms if ever required, as well as “whole lifetime” accessibility concerns addressed at ground.

VERDICT: Not a blessed thing left to do, bar bid, and buy.