House of the Week: Lindville semi-D in Ballintemple could hit the €1m mark
17 Lindville Ballintemple
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Ballintemple village, Cork City |
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€950,000 |
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Size |
250sq m (2,691sq ft) +30sq m attic (approx) |
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Bedrooms |
5 |
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Bathrooms |
4 |
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BER |
C1 |
HARKING back to the past is a trait with a long, long history at Cork’s Lindville – in fact, it goes back almost two full centuries, to the original period house at Lindville, in built-out Ballintemple.
What’s now generally referred to as Lindville is a development of 60 upmarket homes, done to an exacting facsimile of good Victorian design, delivered in the late 1990s and using inspiration from the Victorian originals nearby along Cork’s ever-salubrious Blackrock Road and in and around Ballintemple village.
But, in looking back a century and more for comfortably-assured architectural design as Hogan Architects did nearly 30 years ago, Lindville was retreading old ground.
The original Lindville House dates to the 1780s, but when it was about 50 years of age, its occupants decided to go forward by going backwards, and they had it reconfigured with a Tudorbethan makeover around 1830, according to specialist writer Frank Keohane, in his magnificent 2019 Cork City and Country guide by Yale University Press in their Building of Ireland series.
Keohane picked up on its mullioned windows, canted porch and Diocletion and Venetian windows, and stalwarts of the suburbs and consumers of property porn will recall the still-standing proud Lindville was one of the last houses to be completed in the development, as a painstaking conservation job, taken on by a Munster medic.
So, there’s an original with centuries of changes at Lindville still, in rude good health; long gone is the timber-frame private hospital run by the Sullivan family that occupied some of the c six acres of ground here, but the central avenue trees that led up to it have been kept; the winsome gate lodge at the development’s entrance was built from scratch using salvaged materials, old stone and brick and looking timepiece perfect.
And, then, in between them are 60 Lindville newbies, a mix of large detacheds onto the Blackrock Road, smaller detaches inside, along with a mix of semi-Ds, three-storeys high, as many, many original Victorian homes in urban plots were by necessity of space on expensive ground.
As was widely reported at the time, the original developers at Lindville ran into financial trouble, facing liquidation with many homes having to be finished off by other builders: the stress of it still bothers some of the residents who all, in the end, got comfortable homes for themselves and at prices that today seem as quaintly old-fashioned as Lindville’s decorative carved bargeboards on high gables.
The very biggest sold in the late 1990s for ‘as much as’ €350,000/€400,000, less than a new three bed suburban semi-D today.
One of the lessons still recalled as fact for Lindville’s builders’ woes were that the developers allowed their off-plan buyers alter their booked homes if they wanted to make any changes – as they surely did.
It meant economies and ease of repetitive scale went out the elegant sash windows, work slowed, oversight became overwhelming and the builders went to the wall.
So much history? Up for sale this weekend is 17 Lindville, which it turns out has a portion of the original old Lindville limestone boundary walls in its back garden.
No 17 has been home to the same family from day one, and had possibly the most different deviation from the standard, original floor plan incorporated into it from the get-go.
Its purchasers asked for (and got) a side wing left of the hall to hold an extra large utility room, they also wanted the split level family room off the rear kitchen to be larger than what was in the plans, and they also got an attic conversion put in, at the very top of an already tall, three-storey home, home now to a long home office under a steep roof pitch: it’s reached by a spiral stairs from the second floor.
Including that highest level (which does have restricted head-height bar at the centre) brings the overall floor area to almost 2,700 sq ft, as big as most of the largest A-type detacheds, reckons selling agent Brian Olden of Cohalan Downing.
He guides the five-bed home in well-maintained order at €950,000, and at that it’s likely to be one of the highest valued semi-Ds to sell here as it is so much bigger.
The €1m barrier has been broken several times only by detacheds, about four times since 2010 according to the Price Register, with No 58 the current top performer, making a recorded €1.45m in 2023. Across the road, Ballintemple’s 21 Janeville made €1.25m in 2022, while the wider Ballintemple and Blackrock Road area is, well, littered with €1m-valued homes.
Coming in shy of it, but substantial, No 17 Lindville has good ground floor living and dining space, extra large utility, first floor with three bedrooms (one with en suite and walk-in robes) and second floor with two more plus bathrooms, crowned off by the attic study up the spiral stairs.
Lindville’s location was always top drawer, but municipal investment in the public realm and amenities around the Marina and Atlantic Pond has put Ballintemple back on a par with its heady days of the 18th and 19th centuries.
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