€595,000 Dunmore House is turning heads in Turners Cross
Open plan kitchen/dining room at Dunmore House
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Turners Cross, Cork City |
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€595,000 |
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Size |
175 sq m (1884 sq ft) |
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Bedrooms |
4 |
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Bathrooms |
3 |
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BER |
D1 |
TURNERS CROSS, a mature part of town where everything you need is within striking distance and where community spirit still exists, is one of Cork City’s more affordable neighbourhoods.
A lot of its housing can be traced to a local authority building programme in the early part of the 20th Century. While it was once home to market gardens, the city's burgeoning population made housing a priority. It's one of the earliest suburbs, where rows of former Council homes sit cheek by jowl with the occasional terrace of elegant Victorian homes.
Like many of the city’s older suburbs, it’s in the throes of regeneration now. Fresh paintwork is putting paid to jaded looks and drafty doors and windows are making way for their more energy efficient equivalents.
In the vanguard of the neighbourhood regeneration was Dunmore House, a distinctive-looking property just around the uphill curve of St Patrick’s Road, as it sweeps upwards from Evergreen Road. The process of remodelling it began more than 20 years ago when a Tipperary/Cork couple bought it in a shocking state.
“When we bought it, it was not a nice house. You couldn’t even see it properly in the estate agent’s brochure. It was hidden behind holly and laurel hedging” says owner Róisín.
“It had been for sale for ages. A couple from Northern Ireland were the vendors– and they were looking for IR£180,000. In the end we got it the year 2000 for €157,250,” Róisín says.
“My husband didn’t like it at all, but I knew it had a lot of potential,” she adds.
They knew and liked the area having lived in Parkowen off nearby Quaker Road for a number of years, until children can along and space, or the lack of it, became an issue.
“We had done a nice job of the Parkowen house and made good money on it when we sold it,” Róisín says.
Although their new home was “cold and miserable” they lived in it for a year before deciding what they wanted to do with it.
“We had decided not to spend any money on it that first year because the work we were planning pretty much involved knocking it,” Róisín says.
Once the builders came in, work got underway with gusto and not much of the original 1930’s house was left intact, with the exception of the front drawing room. A tiny PVC porch at the front of the house was knocked and replaced by a bright, attractively-tiled alternative.
“We basically rebuilt the house,” Róisín says.
Then, about 10 years ago, they embarked on another major project, adding on a two-storey extension to the rear.
A bright and spacious kitchen/dining room was added to the ground floor (the old kitchen became the utility) and overhead, a new main bedroom.
The bedroom is particularly impressive, with its towering windows and vaulted ceiling. It faces south so light levels and solar gain are excellent. It comes with a walk-in wardrobe and en suite.
While doing the extension, the couple took the opportunity to revisit and improve the roof insulation. A ceiling was taken down and re-slabbed and more insulation added.
They also re-jigged some of the upstairs layout: there had been a bathroom and separate toilet which all now forms the main bathroom. In re-ordering the layout, they created a corridor down to their own new bedroom. By the time their work was done, the house was double the size (175 sq m) of the home they started out with and had gone from a three-bed to a four-bed (all doubles).
Róisín says they invested in the order of €250,000 in the extensions and upgrades.
These days, there's no vestige left of that "cold and miserable" home. Dunmore House is warm and inviting, and tastefully decorated, with fearless colour choices inside and out. "Carolann Deasy of CDC Interiors came in first day and gave me advice around colours and fabrics. She’s one of those people that gets you and she knew that I wasn’t afraid of colour,” Róisín says. Her choices remain to this day, touched up over the years.
The drawing room (one of two) retained a warm, drawing-room red, the kitchen/dining room, when opens through double doors to the drawing room, remains a tranquil shade of Dulux Heritage Drab green; the main bedroom is Dulux Absolute Viola.
Róisín’s passion for colour is shared by one of her daughters who worked with her mother to transform the gable end of a neighbouring home that adjoins their back garden into a funky patchwork of colour.
“It was an ugly bare concrete wall and she wanted to paint it before her graduation, so we hired a cherry picker and used up all the leftover paint from the garden shed. We used a lot of masking tape and we had great craic doing it. My husband left us to it,” says Róisín.
Dunmore House, an ideal family home, is detached with a path down either side, and is accessible from both St Patrick’s Road (at the front) and from Upper Friars Road (to the rear), from where high double doors open into the private back garden.
There’s a large block-built garden shed that could be a home office (there is home office space in the main house, under the stairs) or converted for use as an AirBnB, says Kevin Barry of Barry Auctioneers. Out front, there’s off-street parking for three cars.
Róisín never had to drive to work – in either the South Infirmary or St Finbarr’s hospitals – thanks to the convenience of the location. A stunning antique fireplace in her drawing room was salvaged from one of her workplaces - the nurses’ canteen in the South Infirmary. It dates to 1722.
Róisín also salvaged some stunning internal doors, including the internal porch door with its coloured glass and the double doors between the kitchen and the drawing room. Other original doors were dipped when they first did up the house at the start of the millennium.
The couple say Dunmore House has been a terrific home, but with kids reared, they’re set to downsize. What they particularly liked about the Turners Cross property was the fact that they were “living in the middle of the city, without ever feeling that we were in the middle of the city”.
Mr Barry, who is guiding the house at €595,000, says it’s a “superb home”, elegantly laid out and decorated, with generously proportioned rooms.
“It ticks all of the boxes really: great location, convenient to the city, to schools and to UCC, within walking distance of the Lough and of shops. It’s the perfect trade up for a family looking for cityside living,” the agent adds.
Spacious and inviting family home in a hard-to-beat cityside location.
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