Grand Designs project up in the West Cork hills and clouds was ahead of the eco-design curve

Derryduff Estate in the wilds of West Cork was ahead of the posse in an eco life style, with carbon-positive builds, writes Tommy Barker

The 144-acre Derryduff Estate with several houses is along the Coomhola river near Bantry on the Cork-Kerry border. Sherry FitzGerald O'Neill's guide at €1.45 million

Coomhola, Bantry
€1.485m
Size	653 sq m (6,980 sq ft) across four houses, on 144 acres with pond
Bedrooms	11
Bathrooms	6
BER	B2

TV’s Grand Designs is going strong for 25 years this year — but the couple behind West Cork’s Derryduff Farm in the unsullied Coomhola valley, Tony and Helen Grubert, were in the place-creating groove ever before it with their own grand design, and their ‘ahead of the curve’ eco-aware sensibilities.

Honey-spot: one of the Derryduff Estate houses

Back in 1992, the couple, originally from London, came across a remote farmhouse up the Coomhola river and by the Borlin valley, where wild West Cork rubs rocky shoulders with wild Kerry and near the sublime Priest’s Leap, run through with a cascading river and watched over by ravens and sheep.

Chasing the dragon? the original house has fun plus function

Having checked out remote Munster settings on Europe’s fringes, from Clare to Cork, the old farmhouse they espied in the hills north of the N71 near Bantry and Ballylickey — and what’s now the Wild Atlantic — Way was owned and lived in by a Dutchman “and was everything we wanted”.

Derryduff homes are in a cluster

It took a bit of time to negotiate, to buy and to make their own, with a bit of over and back and huffing and puffing, but by 1999 — the year Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs first aired on Channel Four — the Bantry area remote hillside home ‘in the clouds’ was theirs; reroofed, and made comfortable, with even likes of underfloor heating in place.

Helen and Tony made the lifestyle move over with their two sons, then aged 12 and 14 years, now adults and who’ve moved back to the UK after formative and engaging years here at Derryduff More, with 144 acres of rugged land to call their own.

Pond with reed-beds and bridge

After the family home was secured, they started on an even more ambitious project, going on to build a series of other houses with a low and no-carbon footprint, so far ahead of the then low-base learning curve on carbon footprint and climate change concerns, capturing carbon in their build so that some of the additional buildings are carbon positive.

A bit of tech too...

They delivered two linked buildings, winsomely called Honeycomb and Honeypot House as an annex, as well as another one, almost entirely off-grid called Honeysuckle. Initially, they used the services of locally-based eco architect Tony Cohu who has a number of low and no-energy building to his credit around West Cork, from the rustic to the high-end like the Inish Beg estate’s boathouse.

Working later with Ballydehob designer Jeremy Baines, there are now up to 11 bedrooms, and the number came in handy as Tony and Helan accommodated guests and students on residential courses they ran in environmentally-friendly design and construction.

Outbuildings

Modestly, Tony reckons their early-adaptation design and build methods (timber framing, ground source geothermal, natural insulation, passive heat gain through orientation using Pilkington K glass, reusing materials, buying entire hardwood trees for milling, etc) inspired a considerable number of self-builds as they had hundreds of keen students visit down the years. 

Workshop

They contributed their labours also in what was true hands-on education, including young families with children who surely embraced a free-range lifestyle whilst in residence, in utterly unspoiled land, many hundreds of feet above sea level, bounded by a river below and with a burly mountain crest above, demarcating the Cork-Kerry border.

Coomhola is a spate river in a beautiful valley setting

Tony later taught courses in UCC’s Science department, imparting his knowledge, perspective and skills, and inter alia the couple set up an eco learning charity called the Unicorn Foundation, long before a ‘unicorn’ came to mean a start-up company worth $1bn or more.

They planted many, many thousands of trees but later deregistered from State planting schemes to plough their own furrow: tellingly, a Christmas tree they planted back out in one of their first festive celebrations in West Cork is now a c 40’ tall pine.

Colour and carvings combine for warm character

Where do the years go? Over 30 years on, Tony and Helen (who also works as a minister and celebrant) are looking to retire and downsize from what’s been a sizeable and considerable lifetime’s work and labour of love, stressing their continuing love of the life and the location.

They hope to stay in the broad locality, and have put their 144-acre holding, homestead, and honeyed collection of other houses up for sale.

It’s all listed with estate agent Ray O’Neill of Sherry FitzGerald who first listed the c 2,400 sq ft Honeycomb House and Honeypot annex on ‘just’ two acres three years ago, totaling five bedrooms for the Gruberts at €375,000.

But, now, with time marching on, the couple have decided to sell the entire lifestyle holding on the full 144 acres, with internal paths, much planting, feature pond with reed-bed waste treatment yet clean enough to wild bathe in and with an arched timber bridge to a tiny island created by one of their carpentry-gifted sons, built without a single nail or screw.

Oh, and the mix also includes Tony’s very large workshed from where much of the joinery for the buildings emerged, set up with saws and lathes, CNC routers, carving equipment, dust extractor and tools galore: there’s even an active wormery, for compost creation.

Sherry FitzGerald now guide the entire lot at €1.485m, describing the Derryduff Estate as a very special listing, “ideal for use as a holiday or retreat centre, hobby sustainable farming enterprise or other West Cork lifestyle uses.”

Clearly, there’s a lot of property here for the right buyer, whoever he, she or they are, and as it now needs some TLC to freshen up and replace some timbers and finishes after the ravages of decades of Irish weather, whoever takes over will need some basic skills, commitment and energy … so the workshop will come in handy.

It’s certainly going to have an appeal to those concerned about environment issues, whether home-grown or arrivals from overseas: volunteer ‘woofers’ to give a helping hand could continue a tradition already kickstarted here.

West Cork alone has seen some noble purchases of land for rewilding, whether down in Beara with writer/forester Eoghan Dalton and his 73 acres, or entrepreneur Bryan Meehan’s purchase of the old oak forest at Dromgarriff on the waters by Glengarriff. Meehan also purchased Kenmare’s Park Hotel last year, so there is money out there for special and rare buys … such as Derryduff Estate, a Grand Design, only with natural grandeur.

VERDICT: “When we started no-one knew much about climate change and carbon emissions: it’s mainstream now, everyone knows about it and so in a sense we don’t have anything to teach,” says Tony reflectively, no longer a lone voice in a very special wilderness.