Inside the €695k Blackwater Mill home blending 1800s history with luxury country living

A restored 7,200 sq ft Cork mill home offers smart tech, historic character, lush gardens, and river access for €695,000

Blackwater Mill has roots back to the early 1800s. Agent Michael O'Donovan Jnr guides the 'old meets new' mix at €695,000. Pictures: MediaPro Cork

Gurteen, Kanturk, North Cork
€695,000
Size	669 sqm (7,200 sq ft)
Bedrooms	6/7
Bathrooms	5
BER	B3

Set just a field back from Munster’s River Blackwater, and with roots back more than two centuries, is the ‘older meets older still’, Blackwater Mill.

Make an entrance in style?

The mix, a 1970s over-basement home with a B3 BER, is set within the immaculate walled grounds of a 1805 flour mill, switched to linen mill use a century later by 1902, reflecting changes in economic and industrial models, before finding a ‘new’ use, as a sheltered private home, from 1975.

Interiors are bright and spacious

The latter build, now half a century old, went through subsequent overhauls too since and comes now for sale, likely to continue in its current iteration, with a number of strong selling factors.

Hit the deck

Apart from the size and interior quality — and its basement gym and games rooms, plus large hot tub  — the attractions include the very substantial surrounding high walls sheltering the grounds and providing privacy via an electric gate in an wide stone arch on the front wall, complete with upstaging ‘soldiers’, like stone battlements: it’s about as impressive a screening wall as you’ll see on a roadside property.

Blackwater Mill's basement 

The setting is on the N72, which runs north of the River Blackwater west from Mallow towards Rathmore, at Gurteen which is south of Kanturk and north of Millstreet, about 50km/minutes from Cork city and about 40km/minutes from Killarney.

Daily grid: mill race replaced by hot tub

Auctioneer Michel O’Donovan jnr of Sherry FitzGerald O’Donovan is selling Blackwater Mill with a €695,000 AMV or about a competitive €1,000 per square metre, and describes the four acres of gardens and woodland it comes with as lush, with right of way access over an adjacent field to the banks of the Blackwater.

Suite dreams

Describing it as “remarkable,” he says the 7,200 sq ft home has been “meticulously restored and enhanced to offer refined country living with every modern convenience”. Instances of modernity include an EV charging station, thermal solar system, smart-home technology, a custom built bar by a dining table for 12 (come to think of it, that’s more old fashioned banqueting than nouvelle cuisine?) and an impressive BER B3 thanks to insulation upgrades, meaning the chance for lower ‘green’ mortgage rates.

Babbling books

Rooms include that dining room, living room, modern kitchen/family dining with vast double range oven and small circular island with sink and spice racks; an office, and two/three mid level bedrooms, with four first floor bedrooms around a long galleried landing with arched window, with the bedrooms at either end being en suite with walk-thru robes.

In all, there are three ensuite bedrooms and five bathrooms in total, plus guest WC, quite the US standard of wash room provision…possibly to go along with the American walnut flooring used in a number of rooms.

There’s both internal and external access to a substantial deck area, with composite decking used, at mid level abutting the stone back boundary wall as a ready reminder of the novelty of the site and its mill heritage.

VERDICT: Comparatively new and upgraded meets much, much older, with grounds and Blackwater river access…definitely a one-off.