All aboard for a €525,000 rail deal on Cork's Lower Glanmire Road 

A home and two shops in a developing part of the city could be a good prospect

Lower Glanmire Rd, Cork City
€525,000
Size	260 sq m/ 2800 sq ft (incl commercial units)
Bedrooms	6
Bathrooms	3
BER	Exempt

More seasoned members of the Lower Glanmire Road community will recall the days when the Roycrofts ran a library out of No 143, one of two shops which the family lived over for about a century. Others still talk about how their adjoining greengrocer’s, No 144, “sold the best ice-cream in Cork”.

It was a time when there were “many grocery shops on the road, and each was able to make a living,” according to the account of one resident (the lowerroad.net).

The Roycrofts, whose home and commercial premises were just before the railway bridge — under which the occasional lorry has found itself jammed — eventually left the Lower Road for Gardiner’s Hill, in St Luke’s Cross. They had already disposed of the house at No 144, so the sale at the time of the St Luke’s move included No 143 and the two ground-floor shops.

In 2016, the premises was purchased by Eileen Dineen Marples, who bought it from a couple of investors.

At the time, it was subdivided into “grotty little bedsits”, she says and it took considerable time and effort to turn it into the comfortable home it is now, where original features, like high ceilings and exposed brickwork, are part of its charm. It’s a house with a long history, dating to 1788, and at one stage it was the premises from which passengers picked up their boarding passes, most likely for steamships departing from Penrose Quay. The house deeds show too that it was lived in by a Captain Perry at the start of the 1900s.

It’s been home to Eileen for the past eight years, and one of her now grown up children, Lauren Marples, opened an award-winning vegan and vegetarian restaurant called 143V in one of the commercial units in 2017. It was going great guns until covid, which forced its closure in 2020. Lauren has since trained as a yoga instructor and you’ll find her running vegan retreats and yoga classes. She’s also an ambassador for yoga clothing mega brand lululemon.

Lauren didn’t lick her entrepreneurial spirit off a stone — her mum ran a beauty salon out of the other commercial unit, having run Academy Beauty & Laser Clinic on Academy Street in Cork city since 1993.

After buying No 143, she moved her business to Lower Glanmire Road, where it’s been based since. She also turned one floor of her four-storey home into AirBnB accommodation. As it’s within a short walk of Cork city’s main train station and the city itself, it’s a good location for visitors. In fact it could have a future as a youth hostel (think Brú on nearby MacCurtain Stree) — with scope to turn the commercial units into more bedrooms. The existing bedrooms are mainly fine big doubles and there’s a bathroom on each floor (with an outdoor loo on the ground floor).

 The premises already has a ground-floor commercial kitchen, installed to service Lauren’s restaurant.

 It has a top floor kitchen/living room too, with a beautiful exposed brick wall, and with a view that you could never anticipate from the terraced street.

 Trees and lush greenery stretch in every direction to the rear of the house, where a garden, reachable via a door at the second return of the stairs, runs down to the old rail line, 20” below the garden wall. 

The land climbs up behind it, towards the lower, leafy reaches of the Montenotte Hotel.

The agent selling the house, Johanna Murphy of Johanna Murphy & Sons, reckons No 143 is an ideal investment opportunity as it’s in the thick of where considerable rejuvenation is scheduled to take place. She points to the exciting plans for development of the nearby docklands, where regeneration has been ongoing on Penrose Quay and Horgan’s Quay. At nearby Kent Station, the frequency of commuter trains is due to improve and the neighbouring Victorian Quarter has improved in leaps and bounds.

“To have a terraced property of such character, with such a great garden, less than a 10-minute walk from town is fantastic,” Ms Murphy says.

“Add to that the fact that so much is planned for the area — the potential for what homes in the neighbourhood could be worth down the road is immense. It’s an no-brainer from an investment perspective.”

Accommodation at No 143 includes the ground floor commercial kitchen, two commercial units, a utility and a living room with double doors to a little courtyard on the ground floor; three bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor; a bedroom, living room, kitchen/dining room and bathroom overhead, and a converted attic with two bedrooms and a bathroom at the top.

The guide prices for the large house is €525,000.

VERDICT: Looks like a good longterm prospect given the level of development planned for the area. The property will require some investment