Meticulous period home restoration could be your €395,000 Rock

Midleton townhouse is a period gem

1 The Rock, Midleton

Midleton, East Cork
€395,000
Size	130 sq m (1400 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	B2

The Coppinger family, moneyed merchants with fingers in many pies, built this elegant redbrick terrace at The Rock, Midleton, in the 1860s.

Historical records show their wide ranging business interests: Brewers, maltsters, bankers, grain merchants. For more than a century, they were the wealthiest Catholic residents of Midleton.

The Coppinger name (Danish) remains on Main Street, where popular bar JJ Coppinger’s is named after Midleton-born John Joseph Coppinger who fought in the American Civil War. By any standards, JJ had a remarkable military career (he was heavily decorated and survived being shot in the neck) and rose to such prominence that the then US President, Chester A Arthur, attended his wedding in 1883. He died in Washington DC in 1909 and is buried in Arlington national cemetery.

Hallway at No 1

Closer to home, the Midleton Coppingers included Edmund, manager of the National Bank on Main Street. There’s a former back building too, adjoining No 1 The Rock, which is currently vacant but could have a promising future as an educational facility, based on the types of enquiries letting agents Cronin Wall Properties are currently fielding.

No 1 The Rock features in Buildings of Ireland, where it is described as “displaying high quality architectural design and execution”.

Lounge

No 1’s 1400 sq ft interior is exemplary too, beautifully restored and refurbished by its current owners who bought it in 2013. “The house was very run down, there was just one toilet on the ground floor, no central heating and no running water,” the owners says.

They carried out a gut renovation from foundation to rafters over three years. External brickwork was restored by Queenstown Restoration from Cobh; Cumnor completed the foundation restoration after a burst pipe was found. Wooden sash windows were made-to-measure by Munster Joinery and timber specialist Bruce Perkins treated the original wooden shutters and rehung them.

House hunters with a preference for period townhouses will love the lofty ceilings and they’ll be truly pleased by the impressive B2 energy rating. They’ll be pleased to hear too that No 1 did not flood during last year’s winter deluge.

A tall, three-storey, end-of-terrace property, accommodation at No 1 includes a lounge on the groundfloor and an open-plan kitchen dining room with double doors to the back garden, which has paving and lawn — albeit there’ll be less of it if new owners proceed with a single-storey, architect-designed extension, which has planning consent.

There’s an extension there already in the form of the existing kitchen where a huge skylight brings light into the rear.

Bedrooms, spread over the top two floors, are as elegant as the downstairs accommodation. Each floor has a bathroom, with high quality fittings.

No 1 is as tasty a townhouse as you will find in Midleton and selling agent Adrianna Hegarty of Hegarty Properties says it’s “captivating”. 

She adds that families will appreciate the proximity to schools and the town centre. With a guide price of €395,000, No 1 is attracting first-time buyers.

VERDICT: Townhouse gem, renovated to a very high standard.