All the hard yards are done at this charming €545,000 Goleen home — all that's left are the fun bits 

The house was once a Coaching Inn and has been prepped to continue in the tradition of catering for visitors

Ballydevlin, Goleen

Goleen, West Cork
€545,000
Size	428 sq m (4607 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	7
BER	B2

ALL the heavy lifting necessary to bring this handsome Goleen home to the level that it’s now at was worth it. It’s at the stage where a buyer can fully appreciate the quality of  workmanship and also easily visualise what the finished house could look like. The only outstanding bits are largely around choice of loos/bathtubs, which light fittings to pick and whether to go colour-mad or stick with natural hues. Really, all that’s left for the buyer is the “fun” bits.

“All the grubby work is done,” says vendor Jane Stewart, and that includes the garden, which bears the fruit (literally) of her professional landscaping talent.

When Jane and her husband David Cook bought the Ballydevlin property in 2015 it was with the intent of running a B&B in their retirement, essentially picking up on the historic legacy of the house. As a former Coaching Inn, tired travellers would have overnighted there, while horses were fed and watered in attached stables. When Jane and David bought the c200 year-old house – then a four-bed private home – the stable was a roofless structure with rubble stone walls.

“With planning permission, we took down the remains of the stable and rebuilt it, using the old stone to clad around a modern build,” says Jane.

They also replaced a lean-to flat-roofed section to the rear of the house with a bigger, two-storey extension; they stripped all the old plaster off the internal walls to expose warm, original brickwork, which they re-pointed; they dug metre-deep (environmentally-friendly) French drains all around the property to take any moisture away and eliminate any dampness; they put in a septic tank big enough for 20 people; they installed a geothermal heat pump (ground-to-water) which heats the radiators and the water and also runs the underfloor heating on the ground floor, and in the two biggest upstairs bedrooms; they put new sash windows into the extensions; they replaced the roof and rewired and replumbed the house. The cumulative effect of their efforts is an excellent B2 energy rating, an impressive result for a building of its vintage. The cost of their efforts was roughly €400,000, on top of the €250,000 they paid for the original house.

While builders and tradesmen did a lot of the construction and internal work, Jane trained her eyes on the garden, giving it the full benefit of her own professional background. As a landscape gardener and an artist, she had a head start and it’s now a triumph of biodiversity, and a haven for birds and butterflies.

An orchard in the front garden that once had just three apple trees and a walnut tree now has a second walnut tree for pollination; several hazel trees of different varieties; two mulberry trees; lots of soft berries; quince, several new apple trees, three pear trees and Sharon fruit, a type of persimmon. The majority of the plants are native to Ireland or are edible.

Closer to the house are ornate terraces laid by the builders, decorated with raised flower beds inside dry stones walls, hand-built by Jane and her musician son Dougie, during the pandemic. “The flowers were specifically chosen as pollinator plants and for fragrance,” Jane says. Beyond the terraces, there are three lawn areas, then, at a further remove, long grass and a wildlife pond and native trees “all to attract biodiversity,” says Jane, adding that “the amount of butterflies on the terrace is just ridiculous”.

She’s delighted with the results, which have helped validate her choice to relocate from her native Scotland to Ireland.

“I wanted better weather, you can’t even grow peas in Scotland,” she laughs. She appreciates Ireland is rainy too, which is why they installed a fabulous canopy over one of several outdoor terraces, to cater for outdoor dining in any weather. A separate, large, uncovered sandstone terrace is an afternoon suntrap.

The backbreaking work continued throughout the pandemic, which brought its own challenges. It was a tough time for Jane as her husband, a doctor, was working in the Middle East and she didn’t see him for nine months. She also realised that running a B&B – or an AirBnB which they decided along the way was a better option – was not where her heart was.

“I design gardens and I paint and when we were doing the house, and dealing with the hassle of builders and tradesmen during the pandemic, it ate into my time, when I could have been doing what I love to do myself.

“And actually, the pandemic did the landscaping profession a favour, because it became acceptable to do garden designs remotely and send them by email to the client.

“It’s now very much the norm for people to shop around the world for their garden designer,” Jane says, who has clients in London and Saudi Arabia.

Jane’s change of heart and a job opportunity in Cork for her husband means they now have their eggs in other baskets and have relocated to Clonakilty. The upshot is that a beautiful Goleen property is on the market with infinite possibilities, although Jane fancies the idea of an artist’s retreat.

“The downstairs living room has the perfect lighting. You could have a group of women down here and give them art classes and show them the scenery,” Jane says.

There are options for what to do with some of the rooms in this c430 sq m property, two-and-a-half times the size of the original house, set on three quarters of an acre. 

These options exclude the handsomely rustic kitchen which is already fitted, meticulously handcrafted by cabinet maker Ger Ward of Ward Wood Design in West Cork.

“He’s a perfectionist,” says Jane, adding that they hired him again to craft a kitchen for the home they now live in.

Excluding the fitted kitchen and the bathrooms, where tiling is done and some Burlington hardware fitted, the remaining rooms - and there's a good few to choose from - can be put to a variety of uses.

Almost completed bathroom

Jane had one earmarked for an office, another as a living room, another as a dining room, and so on, to include study, library, music room and gym, with a hot tub/sauna, opening onto a terrace, in line with the plan for a high-class AirBnB set in the superb West Cork landscape, near magnificent beaches (Ballyrisode is two minutes by car, Barleycove is 10 minutes), and convenient to Goleen village, Schull and Crookhaven.

A new owner might fancy running with the idea of a B&B/AirBnB (an extra big laundry room and an extra big septic tank were designed to cater for this), but as selling agent Niamh Moloney of Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill points out, it could be put to any number of uses: quality family home, yoga retreat, multigenerational living. As it’s in West Cork, there’s a strong possibility too of an overseas buyer snapping it up as a holiday home – in fact interest has already come in from the UK, with a party flying in to view it this week.

“I do think the house has huge potential. And as it’s competitively priced at €545,000, we are seeing a lot of activity around it, including overseas interest and interest from Cork,” Ms Moloney says.

VERDICT: The fact that it requires some internal finishes does not detract from the quality of the home and gardens on offer in a beautiful corner of West Cork.