Blackrock Road's €2.5m Rose Lodge is the pick of the bunch

Born again period home has doubled in size after major architect-inspired makeover

Fri, 09 Aug, 2024 - 17:48

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures: H-pix

Blackrock Road, Cork City
€2.5 million
Size	453 sq m (4,857 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	4
BER	B2

THE late 1800s was a sort of Golden Era for Cork city’s Blackrock Road: many of its finest homes, villas, mansions and terraces came to fill in the gaps between even older beauties, heading east from the old city.

The newbies of the time slotted in between the ancients like the original 16th century Blackrock Castle and Dundanion Castle, and then the more latter day arrivals of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (the 18th century was another golden era for the likes of Chiplee, Ringmahon House and especially Blackrock House.

Interior of Rose Lodge, where old meets new

The latter, dating to the 1700s, and known to many as the ex Ursuline Convent (and, once called Pleasantville) is where a luxe apartment launched at c €1.2m at the start of this summer is just recently ‘sale agreed’.

Graceful proportions and modern edge in 4,800 sq ft home

In this century, the 21st (come on, keep up!) the Blackrock Road from Victoria Road to Blackrock village and past to the Castle Road has seen some of the city’s strongest home sale records and consistently high demand.

The Price Register shows an incredible 30 resales since 2010 at or over €1 million and even more, some 47 €1m+sales, with ‘just’ Blackrock in the address.

The Register also shows six sales at or over €2 million (two are bulks sales) and so four at €2m plus to date. The most recent was the fully restored and contemporised Riverside on Castle Road, at €2.1m, and the largest is a listing called Avoka, in 2017 showing at €4.08m— likely to have been a development site.

Fit for purpose: new wing is multi-purpose, from gym to home cinema, family den, garden room....

The pending sale of a house called Feltrim at the city end, upgraded in the clearly affluent 1890s and on three acres by Ashton school, is likely to set a new price bar: being sold for the SMA religious order it carried a €5m price tag on launch.

Feltrim has been bid above that figure and is now ‘sale agreed’ though whether the buyer is a home-hunter (several very wealthy individuals were in the hunt as it was both home and investment gold) , or a developer, has yet to be confirmed.

All of this is mere background to the arrival of the 1890s- origins Rose Lodge to the open market.

Set on the Blackrock village side of Ballintemple village (the truly prime of the prime stretch?) Rose Lodge is a private home dating to the 1890s and only just through a very substantial overhaul, conservation, and reimagining in the hands of a local family who bought it in 2018, making €1.25 million at the time according to the Price Register.

Rose Lodge had at that stage been a year or so on the market, having been owned by several generations of the well-known Fitzgerald family (members had a large electrical shop on the Grand Parade) and had several small price reductions from an initial €1.5m AMV before the current owners acquired it for €1.25m.

Now, six years later, Rose Lodge is back for sale, only this time it’s not quite the same home: it’s twice the size, is guided at twice the 2018’s sale sum at €2.5 million, and quite incredibly for a venerable Victorian era home, gets a high B2 BER.

That B2 grade means a lower price ‘green mortgage’ — if whoever buys has to, ahem, lower themselves to borrow to buy it.

It’s fresh to market with agent Trish Stokes who correctly bills Rose Lodge’s background as “a tale of two halves,” built in 1890 as a significant home and transformed post-2018 acquisition after “a modern twist, more in keeping with how families live today.”

It’s now 4,850 sq ft, with five bedrooms, all on half an acre of walled and private landscaped grounds, and what’s old and original reads legibly, inside and outside, while what’s new and added on is as obvious, thanks to different glazing treatments, and hung slate shingles set on a diagonal, a bit like fish scales.

And, just as selling agent Ms Stokes bills it as a house of two halves, it’s also a house of two facades: it looks as lovely from the private, north facing six-bay elevation with its east-end bay or bow window as it does on the sun-soaked four-bay south façade and sun terrace.

While the original Victorian section has been sensitively made over with some cracking original rooms (there’s a glorious double aspect main reception), plus panelled study with superb fireplace) the new arrival on the city end is different in design, nature feel, added on the western gable and stepping down via a link section to ‘back room’ uses, such as a utility/pantry, and lofty, multi-use room, currently a gym with sauna, but as equally ready to be adapted for further living, self-contained suite, or a home cinema par excellence (Oscar winner Cillian Murphy grew up just along the way in Ballintemple: just saying.)

Behind the design were the owners themselves working their brief with architect John Butt of Brian O’Kennedy Engineers and Architects offices, with conservation and construction done by Dan O’Brien of OBR: the builder took it on as a special project as he and the owners knew and respected one another well.

The property got its transformation to how its presents today just as covid struck four years ago, and the gym was both as healthy an addition as had been hoped for as it was a sanity saver at the time of lockdowns, says one of the family.

He adds it was the running they had done in previous years around the Cork harbour blue-way from Rochetown to Blackrock’s pier cafe and bakery for a breather put them in mind to chase down Rose Lodge when it came for sale.

It too is as tasty as anyone (with appropriate funds) could wish for, finished and fitted to the n-th degree, all ready to move into — the hard work has been done, as well as the reimagining, to a standard that will impress those back from lives abroad earning serious money, as much as it will to locally-generated affluence.

“It was a huge feat to create a home that is modern, bright, fitted with every convenience for today’s living while at the same time retaining the character of a building that started its life in 1890,” says estate agent Trish Stokes. offering it at a time of extreme short supply of homes at all price points in Cork city.

Not surprisingly, a recent Myhome survey shows there’s just 50% of the volume of second- hand home on the market nationwide this summer, compared with 2014.

She, and other agents, are aware of a coterie of buyers currently on the home hunt in and around Cork city’s suburbs with multi-million euro sums to spend, and only a trickle of supply envisaged in the next season too.

Only a few of that elite crew have found homes this year: cases in point are Kennitt House on the Rochetown Road, showing in June 2024 on the Price

Granted that the air is pretty thin at the €2m+ price level (West Cork, and Kinsale get more than the city ever does!) keen property watchers - and the rest of us who are just plain nosey - tend to obsess on what does sell in the uppermost echelons and why.

RIGHT now, apart from the perennial under-pinners of location, location and location, the other big motivator is walk-in condition: superbly-set Rose Lodge scores heavily on this front too.

The immediate hinterland includes sites for new-builds that have sold for €500k for the plot alone (and, they’ll never be half an acre in size like Rose Lodge’s); Trish Stokes sold a house directly across the road, Jesmond, last year for a recorded €1.09m; a new-build, one of two on a knock-down site, No 154A Blackrock Road made €1.75m last year; the Barry/Clune family bought and sold in the €1m+ league across the road, while a Tiger Times build nearby of c 2005 cost a then-reported €5m or so to deliver.

One of the city’s classics, The Rectory by Menloe Gardens sold a decade ago, making €2 million in 2014 and is now after tranches of work likely to be worth many multiples of that sum. Its owners are currently in planning for a detached garage on the 1870s’ Rectory’s grounds.) Also near Menloe/Rose Lodge, the former Dunlop House/Drumcora is in the final stages of conversion to luxury apartments too.

When Rose Lodge came for sale back in 2017, its then-owners were in the lucky position of being able to build anew on a portion of the original grounds, to the immediate north.

That’s fully built and occupied and utterly out of sight from Rose Lodge, low slung behind a high wall, and as a result each home has full privacy one from another, bar the shared direct access inside the original Rose Lodge before their individual drives separate, each behind specially-designed electric access gates.

The sales details prepared for Rose Lodge’s handover speaks of “real Cork,” listing the old boundary walls, the internal character and history and the locally-sourced crew who reworked it all. A slight exception was the input of South African-born architect Ilsa Rutgers, who has been in Ireland since around 2000, working the likes of MOLA and now specialising in her own field, landscape design. Rutgers has a local portfolio that includes Kerry and Cork, including Blackrock Road and Jacobs Island and her design for Rose Lodge kept all trees of note, including apple and silver birch, and added lawns in tiers to the north, mop-headed limelight hydrangeas, screening boundary planting with the likes of thulias and feature beds with acers on the southern enclosure and expansive limestone terrace.

Inside, the services of Roisin O’Brien, an interior designer, were commissioned for a cohesive look that sees intergenerational rooms spanning centuries easily rub shoulders with one another.

The main, day-to-day family space will of course be the kitchen, and here now it’s part of an airy, double aspect multi-use space that include kitchen, with units by high-end local specialist David Kiely, with Christoff units and a super-large Lacanche range with more hobs than you could shake a cupboard of pots and pans at: it’s a serious bit of cheffing kit.

David Kiely also did the bespoke fitted furniture such as book cases, utility room, display cabinet and dressing rooms/robes, while painstaking work went into other joinery such as skirtings and architraves in the older section to keep faith with the likes of fine fireplaces and the original front door.

Brand names (but the less flashy ones) abound, such as Miele appliances, lighting from Irish niches specialists Mullan, Farrow & Ball paints, and sanitary ware from Bayswater and to Neptune and Laura Ashley while “any original element that could be used was used in this new home,” observes auctioneer Ms Stokes.

One of the vendors ruefully observes that while Rose Lodge looked well from initial outset when the family first viewed, a deeper examination showed where extensive work was by then needed: it’s a refrain familiar to many who’ve looked at charming period properties with, eh, rose tinted spectacles.

Today’s Rose Lodge stands up to any scrutiny, with underfloor heating, B2 BER, costly alu-clad glazing, top bathrooms, reserved bedrooms (the main at first floor level is directly over the main 500 sq ft drawing room, with generous bay window with three sash window and over-size en suite with roll top bath and rainforest double shower).

Two other bedrooms are en suite and the top/second floor via a spiral stairs has two further bedrooms, one with a seeming wonky off-centre gable window as an original quirk, and share a Jack and Jill bathroom.

Family members have already started to fly the nest, to both southern and northern hemispheres, and the chance to work overseas once more as well keeping a yet-to-be decided Cork base mean Rose Lodge’s arrival on the late summer residential market, adding a frisson to the upper end where there’s only very limited chances to buy walk-in order home is such a location.

VERDICT: A rose, by any other name...

CONNECT WITH US TODAY