Quality from top to Toe Head in seaside West Cork beauty with pristine swimming pool

Vistas of coast and countryside come with headland home built with love by UK/Irish family

Sat, 24 Aug, 2024 - 11:59

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports Pictures Tom Vaughan

Toe Head, Castletownsend, West Cork
€895,000
Size	404 sq m (4,300 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	4
BER	C1

THERE’S no getting away from family roots — and that was the blessing for the Frost family from London, who got this blessed site, on brooding Toe Head in West Cork thanks to their mother Eleanor’s Skibbereen heritage, and a deep ‘love of place’ homing instinct.

The late Derek and Eleanor Frost got the lucky break to build in a pure, unadulterated West Cork landscape with beloved views of the Fastnet lighthouse in the 1980s, and with notorious Stags Rocks as a locational marker with their then-young family of four children thanks to Eleanor’s McCarthy family connection to nearby Skibbereen town.

Hot and cold running water: heated pool, or sea swimming? All options open at this Toe Head home

The McCarthys had been one of several families with successful bakeries in Skibbereen in the 1900s: Eleanor herself was the eldest of 10 children, and moved to London where she qualified first as a nurse. Later she went into social work before taking on a further life shift when she joined her English-born husband, quantity surveyor Derek Frost, in what evolved into a ‘design and build’ practice in London on a range of projects.

Toe hold: home called Frevett has an upside-down layout

With their mutual skill-sets, and love of locale and the ocean, they not only got to build an intriguing holiday home here 40 years ago, they later got the chance to add to it in the 1990s, when they also put in an indoor swimming pool, as immaculate today as the day it was first put in, and has been heavily used and enjoyed, in all weathers.

Privately set behind stunning stone walls, a bit like Kerry's Staigue Fort?

Eleanor (nee McCarthy) was the only one of her siblings to emigrate, say the now-grown family who’ve managed to keep their own deep connections to this stunningly beautiful, craggy, rock-strewn West Cork landscape between Castletownshend and Baltimore.

It came about through McCarthy family links, decades of holiday in and around Skibbereen and now several live locally and own their own homes here too.

House has this virtual self-contained section with the best of views

The family called this much-loved home Frevett, after two aunts on the Frost family side, Freda and Yvette — who generously gave financial gifts to enable the home to be done to the level at which it now stands. It was done in two seamless tranches, first 40 and then then 30 years ago, on generous grounds of half an acre, ringed along the narrow coastal headland lane, it’s also fringed by a remarkable lichen covered stone wall, with tantalising glimpses only of what might lie inside its gently landscaped gardens.

It comes for sale late this summer in immaculate order as an executor sale (listed with a €895,000 AMV via estate agent Maeve McCarthy of Charles P McCarthy in Skibbereen who rightly bills it as “a rare offer and opportunity,”) following the death in April 20, 2023, of Derek Frost, after he moved over full-time at the start of Covid restrictions — after his wife Eleanor’s own passing around the start of the global pandemic.

Indicative of the way he’d embraced Irish life and ways, the late Derek Frost has a full-blown traditional Irish wake here last year, with seven grandchildren inducted into the ceremony, and the family say he loved being here, sailing his Cornish crabber boat in the bay and waters and coves around the headland. He would swim faithfully in the pool, doing 30 lengths daily up to his very last days.

Today, the house itself and its feature stone walls done by local men, Bill and John O’Mahony, engage the eye in a non-shouty way with only a hint of something a bit out of the ordinary to be savoured. That’s down to things like the covered first floor gable balcony, exposed roof timbers under the projecting eaves, steep roof pitches, dormer and high-quality Welsh slate, and just its careful positioning, facing obliquely to the scenic roads outside.

Design day-one was by architect Peter Faggetter, who although Britain based, had done some West Cork projects. This included the Crookhaven Inn back in the 1980s, and he delivered an ‘upside-down’ layout to get the very best of the views from the upper level.

Builder was the highly-regarded Christy Collins, a firm still building and now in a next generation also and the workmanship is highly-rated by the Frost family who also have deep construction project skills in their own current generation.

Today, inside a hall/vestibule with part-glazed feature half door there are four ground-floor bedrooms, one of them en suite, two family bathrooms, and links to the pool area, plus utility/store, and linkages that cleverly include two staircases (one straight down to the swimming pool) plus a discretely sited small lift, handy for all sorts of accessibility, for the able bodied and the less able.

Décor is simple: Small terracotta tiles throughout the ground floor, pine sheeting and pine doors in gleaming varnish, varnished hardwood in the pool room stairs, with sparkling timber roof trusses in that c 500 sq ft room’s vaulted space, contrasting with tiny mosaic tiles in the pristine pool.

That leisure room has double doors that open to a sheltered terrace for indoor/outdoor enjoyment on finer days and parties, and there’s a changing/shower room at the far end.

The family switched their heating set-up to an air-to-water Daikin set-up with to heat pumps a few years ago, with consequent energy savings accruing (the property is C1 rated in any case) whilst adding to the safety and efficiency of the 10-m by 4m indoor heated swimming pool is a very robust sliding cover which retracts fully out of sight via an electric mechanism — another example of the precision of design and build delivery at this very special one-off home.

Back in the ‘main house,’ the upper floor is given over to an airy large, triple aspect living/dining/kitchen space Dutch wood burning stove, with sea and coastline views on two sides and glimpses of the old early 1800s Napoleonic signal tower (later on used as coastguard station) uphill and inland in another direction.

There’s also a pantry, access to a large attic room with pull-down stairs and as part of the latter-day, 1990s extension there’s a vaulted, virtually self-contained studio with pull-down ‘Murphy’ bed, kitchenette, bathroom, second wood-burning stove and bifold doors to a large, veranda-like sheltered terraced space with glass balusters and incredible sea views.

This section is mostly likely any visitor’s TV ‘Red Dot’ seating spot, with stepped access down to a sheltered garden for BBQs, ringed by roses, mature shrubs, echiums and more.

Attached to the house is a triple garage and storage room, ideal for boats, garden gear, hobby and sports stuff, cars and pets, and the grounds inside the quite remarkable loose stone wall (think Staigue Fort on the Ring of Kerry for a ‘slightly larger’ example!) have several very sheltered sections (this is the Wild Atlantic Way, after all,) including a vegetable garden with raised beds and potting shed — as well as the retained outline of an old famine cottage.

Kowloon Bridged foundered off the Stags Rocks and Toe head in 1986. Pic: Denis Minihane

The family recall the grounds of their home being used as a temporary base by local and international media back in late 1986, after the large ore carrier the MV Kowloon Bridge drifted onto reefs and rocks at the Stags just off Toe Head, which left devastating damage for fish and wildlife for years after along the shoreline.

On a more consistent note, there’s the flash of the Fastnet lighthouse visible each night from Frevett, a beacon that meant so much to the late locally-born Eleanor Frost: She even had a Velux window in the kitchen repositioned at a lower level so that she could see the flash (one every five seconds) while sitting at the head of her dining table.
VERDICT: There’s quality top-to-toe all the way at this lovely Toe Head one-off home, from the build and finishes to the mounded stone walls, redolent of olden days when the notion of an indoor, air-to-water heated swimming pool would have been, well, incomprehensible.