Raising the roof with attic conversion at €395,000 Glounthaune home

Lucky for someone, no 13 Gort Fada is an "A" rated home

Sun, 04 Feb, 2024 - 12:00

Catherine Shanahan

Glounthaune, Cork
€395,000
Size	109 sq m (1171 sq ft)
Bedrooms	3
Bathrooms	3
BER	A3

THE last house that sold in Glounthaune’s Gort Fada was a three-bed semi-d, just like this one, which came to market for €365,00 and sold for €430,000. The result augurs well for the vendors of No 13, which Savills are launching with a guide price of €395,000. Externally, the main difference is that No 16 has cedar timber cladding and No 13 does not.

What No 13 does have, unlike its near neighbour, is a converted attic.

The work to convert the attic was only carried out in the past six months and the owners’ original intention was to create a home cinema “as the gable wall would work perfectly with a large screen”, they say.

For this reason, they provided a healthy dose of sockets, saving new owners the bother, if they too decide on a top floor movie venue. Of course it doesn’t need to be for exclusive movie use. On a practical level, it’s a ready-made 38 sq m home office, with an alcove that’s just the right size to accommodate a desk/chair. The owners also had the foresight to add an extra velux over the alcove to create a bright work place.

“It’s an amazing, light-filled room with an exceptionally high finish, which makes for a really pleasant work-from-home space,” the owners say, adding that they installed additional sound- proofing in the floor to mute the general noise of living on the floors below. A new owner has a range of attic options: continue as cinema/home office, or adapt to a gym or teen den etc Gort Fada is a reasonably young estate and No 13 is just half a dozen years old. Its Glounthaune location makes it a good option for house hunters looking for a nice corner of suburbia with good access to the city via public transport: Glounthaune train station is a five minute walk away, so it’s an easy commute for anyone working in the city or whose kids go to school there.

Trains travel to Midleton too. The train line is due to be upgraded and the frequency of train services increased. A new cycleway/walkway into Glounthaune village passes by Gort Fada and will eventually run from Dunkettle to Midleton.

Gort Fada is on an elevated site overlooking the inner waterways of Cork Harbour, beyond the dormer homes of Johnstown Park, and homes come with an excellent A3 rating, which means buyers can qualify for cheaper green mortgage rates.

A block-built house, the owners say it’s a warm, well-insulated comfortable house with underfloor heating on the ground floor “a welcome treat for cold toes and feet”.

Accommodation at No 13 includes a living room to the front of the house with integrated wood-burning stove and double doors to an open plan kitchen/dining room.

From here, a sliding glass door leads to a maintenance free garden, where there’s a compact patio of porcelain tiles, added just last year.

Also added (with a 10-year warranty) was the drained artificial grass.

There’s an option to extend the garden, the owners say, two to three metres beyond the existing fencing.

Back inside there’s a utility off the kitchen and a guest WC off the hallway. Overhead, the main bedroom of three has an ensuite.

Selling No 13 is Savill’s Lawrence Sweeney and he says the six-year-old home is “beautifully presented”, in a niche development of just 23 homes. It’s a five minute walk to the Harper’s Island Wetlands nature reserve, which is home to a large variety of waterbird species, and features a beautiful walking trail. It’s about 10km from Cork City and is close to a road network that links to the Dunkettle Interchange, for onward travel to Dublin, or west, through the Jack Lynch Tunnel.