Super-prime Coolim on Blackrock's Castle Road comes to market at €650k

A neighbour called Riverside made €2.1million, but this one's 'only' €650,000. Phew!

Fri, 19 Jul, 2024 - 00:00

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures John Roche

Castle Road, Blackrock Cork City
€650,000
Size	160 sq m (1,710 sq ft)
Bedrooms	2
Bathrooms	1
BER	D2

AT THIS Georgian gem in the rough called Coolim, you’re between a rock and a hard place — or, at least, you’re between Cork’s chi-chi Blackrock village and a rock-solid, stone structure that is the iconic Cork emblem, Blackrock Castle.

All eyes on Coolim? Mid-terrace Georgian home is just a few hundred yards from iconic Blackrock Castle. Image John Roche

In the case of Coolim’s address, we’re talking the Castle Road, one of the city’s loveliest and leafiest routes of all, skirting the waters of the harbour opposite Tivoli and Glanmire: it’s just east of the Marina and pier and its buzzy chattering class cluster — in the very heart of the one-time fishing village of Blackrock, a spot where private homes now are quite the catch.

One of the most recent sales on Castle Road is that of Riverside, a late 1700s home brought to an A2 BER and which featured here in May 2023, when it was noted “given the already proven allure and cachet of Cork’s Blackrock district, and Castle Road in particular, it’s likely to be one of this year’s most coveted offers at the upper end of the southern capital’s house market, kindly treated and with kudos aplenty”.

So it proved to be. The future-proofed Riverside had launched at €1.65m with agents Ann O’Mahony and Stuart O’Grady of Sherry FitzGerald, being sold for a professional couple who had bought it for €875,000 a few years prior ....before spending hugely on it post-purchase.

It was to have been the ‘home for life,’ but a career move at the upper echelons of the medical consultancy world and which was too good to pass up to Dublin had seen them opt to relocate.

Viewers, and the hot Cork City trade-up market for walk-in order homes, clearly appreciated what they’d done at Riverside. It soared past its €1.65m AMV by circa 30%, to fetch a recorded €2.1m, with the sale agreed having been slightly delayed as a planning compliance issue had to be clarified.

At a hefty €21.m, Riverside isn’t even the biggest sale of the past year in Cork City. That honour appears to have gone to Kennitt House on the Rochestown Road, sold for an even €3m via an off-market process by Savills. Coincidentally, the 5,000 sq ft top-end Kennitt House had also been owned by a top medic, and had appeared here back in 2021 with a different agent, then guided at €3.2m.

So, back now to Castle Road, and to Coolim, with its €680,000 guide, quoted by Sherry Fitz’s Ann O’Mahony and Stuart O’Grady, and it’s a different proposition to thier Riverside sale. None the less desirable, but for a different cadre of buyer, and broadly (very broadly?) more affordable.

The Price Register shows a dozen Castle Road resales over the past decade in excess of €600,000, the latest being €830,000 for a modern home at 10 Sandy Lane near Blackrock Castle, popping up officially there just last month.

Another sale there was one to rugby’s Peter O’Mahony and his lawyer wife Jessica, and whose interiors and gardens sometimes appear on social and ‘celeb’ print media, without actually identifying the exterior (it’s also a period property).

Who’ll come to the fore for Coolim, currently a two-bedroom mid-terraced home, with some basics done, habitable for sure, but heaving with potential to bulk up, to shine up and to blossom forth?

It even has an enormous magnolia tree spreading across the width of its very long back garden, possibly of the biggest of any magnolia in any city suburb?

Will it be a professional sportsperson, a broad-of-shoulder Munster player? Someone in the arts, or architecture who’ll work with it and enhance it all the more? It’s an open guess right now.

Today, it’s an executor sale being sold on behalf of the family of a gentleman who’d lived here for decades, the retired architect Bill Murphy, who clearly valued his home’s authenticity and originality.

Mr Murphy “had a huge interest in maintaining the historic features of the house,” say relatives of the recently deceased occupant.

“He reroofed the house in 2003 along with his neighbour. He kept all his costs on house renovations including double glazing his front windows which are unique to this house,” they add, of the well-considered replacements done about 20 years back in slender timber frames, double glazed and with feature arches.

They say the deeds put the age at the early 1800s, in the same sort of time line of Castle Road’s many other villas, big Victorian and Georgian houses, lodges and winsome, chocolate-box pretty cottages.

Previous owners include Eileen Hall of the R&H Hall milling family, and the deeds also show Cooolim’s name at one stage being changed to ‘Medfield,’ while another owner changed it back to Coolim, which it still reflects on its Castle Road roadside nameplate.

From the get-go, ivy-bearded Coolim has kerb appeal, with mature flowering tree front garden and gravel drive, with its ornate windows and hint of ‘olde worlde’, with venerable entrance pillars: it’s one of the many homes on this stretch competing for attention among the many appreciative walkers, cyclists and buggy pushers.

Their walks can stretch back to the city almost and to the Marina, past the village and pier and cafes and bars, out to the rounding bulb of the Mahon Peninsula, past Blackrock Castle and around then to Rochestown and back along the shoreline toward Passage West and Monkstown. Castle Road is the golden mile, along this miles’ long walk route.

Despite having several owners and changes of occupier over the past 50 years+ (one, prior to 1979 enhanced the garden planting but it’s had to have a hard cut-back at the rear before coming to market to show the extent of the private rear garden) it has oodles of originality inside for purists to work with. Check out the stairs, landing and ceilings, some 10’ high, ornate coving, sliding sash windows and shutters, and on down to lovely chimneypieces.

Entered slightly off-centre, it has a over-lit door, inner porch, and reception rooms left and right, unequal in size. The larger (centre pic) feels like a small ballroom.

That one on the right, the larger by a good bit, is double aspect front-to-back with glazed doors to an old fashioned lean-to conservatory with mature vine currently fruiting. However, with so-far bitter grapes, might a sale be sorted by the time they ripen and sweeten?

There’s only the most basic of kitchens and upstairs are two bedrooms, both large, one to the right with its own large 1960s/’70s style coloured bathroom suite and large spotlit makeup mirror.

Oddest of all it the position of Coolim’s main bathroom. It’s right in the middle of the landing, with the best of the back garden views to be had from the bath via large picture windows.

As it’s emptied out now for its sale, viewers will have to look past some of its slightly forlorn yet honest presentation, and most if not all will be looking to extend to the back so the current layout upstairs at least is almost an irrelevance. As it’s mid-terrace neighbours have previously ‘gone large’ out the back themselves, there’s precedent and the aspect is bang-on for building towards the sun, basically southerly (pic, left).

Yet, for all its promise, wily buyers could just stretch themselves to whatever it takes to manage to buy it, then make the most of what they have right now with a tidy-up and decorative input plus a cheap and cheerful kitchen.

Then, get to work on the garden and go for a ‘phase two’ when future plans and funds allow, to make the most of the existing features, see where the light gets deep in, and hope that building costs might come down a tad in the interim.

VERDICT: Georgian gem to polish, and it’s perfect for a couple, or traders-down, say Sherry FitzGerald. Others with families might see it as a prospect to maximise after keeping the façade as it’s not a protected structure.

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