Cork’s Ravenscourt House hits the market at €4m, city’s highest asking price in decades

Pristine 1790s home on 1.4 acres has highest home asking price in the city in 20 years: selling agent says 'where else would you get this mix?'

Fri, 29 Aug, 2025 - 08:17

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports

Well Road, Skehard, Cork City
€4 million
Size	597 sq m (6,390 sq ft)
Bedrooms	7
Bathrooms	5
BER	Exempt

RAVENSCOURT House is outstanding in all sorts of ways, just one of them being the €4m asking price, the highest on any Cork city home for decades.

Ravenscourt, up there with the very best of Cork City’s period homes, comes for sale after a recent city record of €3m set last year by Kennitt House on the Rochestown Rd, where, in the mid-2000s, during the Celtic Tiger, major sales also included big, early 1900 detached houses Inneskerr and Gortalough, at c €4m a pop, while the all-time record for a private city home still stands at c €5m, for Woodlawn in Sunday’s Well.

High-end Woodlawn, Italianate and dating to the mid- to late 1900s, had a distinguished bow end. Here at Ravenscourt, there are three bows to boast about as it comes to market with agent Trevor O’Sullivan, of Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty, with its €4m price proudly attached as a prize. First, private viewings started this week; now, it’s open season.

The glass pavilion is a fantastic addition

Perhaps the Cork family that won the €250m Euro Millions lotto in June can pick up Ravenscourt for comparatively small change for one of their children, as they indicated they’d like to do. Only problem? Getting other houses of similar quality for the other siblings.

Other stand-out features? How about a property pedigree stretching back to 1790, built at the same time as some of the great estates house of the Mahon peninsula and originally named LakeVille. Its next owners could be still here in time for its 250th birthday?

How about architectural distinction, with its distinctive bow ends, redone, hipped slate roof, decorative spandrels, limestone quoins, array of Regency era windows, and interior grace?

Or how about its superb physical condition for such a venerable age, restored and conserved and with huge integrity, reflected in its protected structure status?

Or, how about something as prosaic as location? It’s set at the brow top of the Well Rd, where it meets the Skehard Rd, with Douglas in one direction and a walk away, and Ballintemple and Blackrock in the other, with business parks and retail therapy at reinvigorated Mahon, with plans for a €200m upgrade to the Mahon Point centre to tie in with its 20th anniversary.

Ravenscourt House’s setting on this hill height means it easily earns the description ‘commanding,’ looking down over the Douglas and Mahon estuary, into the heart of Douglas village, and over to the swathes of ‘new housing’ on the Rochestown and Maryborough hills, beyond the ring road, which gives a regular audio thrum to remind there is a world beyond Ravensourt’s (electric) gates and private, 1.4 acre of grounds.

Back in its earlier, 19th century days, as LakeVille, it stood on its own 87 acres when owned by the Haines family, co-founders of the Cork Constitution. Later owners included members of the Crosbie family of Cork Examiner repute.

That its survives so well today is down to a private buyer with an IT background who veered in to niche property projects via his company, Grangefield Developments. He amassed a small clutch of period Cork city homes in the late 1990s and 2000s, including Arbutus House, a villa on the Mardyke, building a hidden home in a quarry off High St, and doing a small number of developments, such as apartments on Wellington Road.

When he acquired Ravenscourt House over two decades back, on 2.5 acres, it was in rag order, having been in the hands of the Southern Health Board, who’d operated it in the 1970s as a day care psychiatric centre, as well as administrative offices for the GMS payments board for general practitioners.

After a period lying idle and boarded up (it escaped the fate of other classic Cork homes, such a Vernon Mount, with which it shared some characteristics and dates, destroyed by fire in 2016) the house got a full refurbishment, part-funded by the construction of four detached houses, each of c 3,000 sq ft built in part of its gated grounds. They came about after several planning refusals in the mid 1990s, finally approved in the mid-2000s. Three of the four were put for sale in 2011, each for €950,000 and with woodland screening the cluster from the Skehard Road/Well Road nexus.

The 6,300 sq ft Ravenscourt House subsequently sold in 2015 to its current owners, who reared a family here.

The couple, with medical/nursing backgrounds, have Munster roots: She’s Co Kerry, he’s Cork city, and they did the move to Australia first, spending years in Melbourne, before coming home to a senior job in Crumlin in Dublin and then down to a post in a Cork private hospital in the 2010s.

Having been around the world, in a way, they came to Ravenscourt and its 1.4 acres by the shortest possible leg of the family’s journey: They had been renting one of the four ‘new’ builds here in the grounds, and simply ‘jumped the fence,’ with six children and dogs, after agreeing to buy.

The Price Register shows Ravenscourt selling to them for €1.1m in 2015, after it, too, had been rented, but during this family’s tenure it went from being a house of considerable stature to being a family home par excellence. Two important changes give it its 21st century elan, ease, and, yes, a bit of edge.

Marble topped island is 16' long in resituated kitchen

They moved the kitchen up from the lower ground floor to the mid-level, where it had suffered from lack of external access and any real grandeur, installing a very high-end David Kiely kitchen, complete with 16’-long granite-topped island, which was needed for day-to-day dining for a large family on the go.

They got permission for a curved, external staircase from the bow end of the large kitchen (it’s eight metres/c 25’ long and five metres wide, with window seats) down to the side- and front-garden terraces, skilfully executed with bull-nosed limestone steps and cast-iron rails. Apart from looking ‘just right,’ it gives massive more utility and fluidity to the house by the simple expedient of this indoor/outdoor link.

Then, and only in the last year or two, they added a garden pavilion room to the grounds, a short ‘breathing space’ away from the main house. It’s one, big, open room, with fossil-flecked limestone floor, with walls all in glass, with its all-weather aluminium frame pretty unobtrusive. This garden room, or pavilion’s louvered roof, is in two retractable sections, enabling it to be open to the skies for clear moon-lit lights and meteor showers, and, while closed, can be made cosy with two roof-mounted heaters.

It was supplied, fitted, and finished by Carrigaline-based Fastnet Blinds, who do a range, from awnings and pergolas up to this sort of addition, ones on this scale perhaps more usually seen in commercial and hospitality settings than in private homes.

Here, likely cost, all-in, for the pavilion, came close to the €100k price mark and was, say the owners, so well worth it, getting year round use by all members of the family, as well as being a great bright spot to look back up and from where to admire the house, come all weathers.

Period drama: home cinema in the lower ground flor

When it comes to the house itself, and starting from the ground up, it’s clearly big, and accommodating, but not intimidatingly so.

Starting on the lower ground level, there is a home cinema, cosy and carpeted and with sofas, with eye-level small windows (looking to the front drive) with a 4k Sony cinematic projector, onto a 120” screen with surround sound. Also down here, the 2000s-era kitchen is now a very practical utility/laundry repository for sports gear (with external access now), with units by David Kiely, and there’s also a large bedroom, plus a bathroom.

The main floor has three grand rooms, each bow-ended, and a television room left of the front door. Behind is the main drawing room, facing south with a bow window facing east and the high-spec kitchen/family dining room, with Aga.

An annex to the right is over two levels, or with a half landing, with up to three bedrooms here, right of the hall, with a plant room (great drying for clothes).

A generous staircase leads to the first floor, with three very fine bedrooms, each with bow end, and the front two are en suite, with walk-in wardrobes, with a further family bathroom also at this level.

Take a bow: Ravenscourt's USP is its Regency style bow ends

The layout is adaptable for many family life stages, with options for more private quarters for older teens and twentsomethings, while there’s enough by the main bedroom for young children to sleep near the folks. That’s the luxury of space, and an abundance of rooms….all used here, and homely with it.

Finishes include sliding sash windows, solid-oak or tiled floors in neutral colours, drylined external

walls (there’s no BER, though, as it’s exempt), and full rewiring and replumbing done 20 years ago, and is well up to spec.

Heating is via gas, with two boilers, and the house was reroofed as recently as 2023, to include leading on the top ‘cone’ ends’ over the curvaceous bows.

Ceiling heights are generous, too, at c 12’, with simple coving and plaster roses. There’s an elegant fanlight over the robust front door, wider than the door (framed by Ionic columns, the door’s original, restored) and while most windows are six-over-six sliding sashes, there’s also a tripartite window on the landing, and a lunette ope on the northern flank in the annex.

Arched brow: windows are the eyes of a house

Condition is excellent, top to bottom (what reassurance in a new roof on a home of this vintage, done by builder Michael Hanrahan?) and the private grounds inside electric gates have a wide gravel drive. A SteelTech shed is well screened, and the exterior apron is a mix of gravel and limestone paving, with lawns beyond and secure boundaries, with the option of a second access point by dense hedging via Douglas Hall Mews/Brickfield, off the Skehard Rd.

Limestone steps to the front door were restored by Listowel-based Quilter Stone. The grounds include an outdoor BBQ/oven near the newly-added, game-changing pavilion, and more limestone steps lead to a lower sloping lawn, beneath a low parapet wall, with estuary and distant view from just about every position, inside and outside.

Ringing it to the south is the Mahon Golf Club, a 5,000-yard, 70-par, 18-hole parkland course opened in 1980 as Ireland’s first municipal course and some bedrooms give glimpses through trees of players.

Commuters on the south city ring road, and those living over on the facing hills of Rochestown/Maryborough, get long views to Ravenscourt House. It stands proudly alone, with its ample breathing space either side, and sweeps down over groomed golf course greenery to the Dougas estuary, almost as much of a landmark now as it must have been back in the 1790s, when it first appeared on this hill as a crowning glory.

It also fills the view from the public park at Beaumont/Ballinlough half a kilometre away.

Ravenscourt House comes to market in a year of big asking prices for top Cork city homes: A 1920s Arts and Crafts/Tudor style home, Kendalsbrae, on 2.25 acres off the Well Rd at the village end, came for sale in March, with a €2.95m AMV, an E1 BER, and is a substantial upgrade project for the next owner.

A walk-in order Blackrock Rd home put for sale in 2024 had a deal reportedly agreed at c €3m, but the vendor since took it off the market, and Kennitt House, on the Rochestown Rd, got that €3m sum also in 2024, also in the ‘hang your hat’ top condition.

Lisney Sotheby International Realty’s Trevor O’Sullivan is confident of this €4m AMV, having had very strong sales to left-of-field buyers in the likes of Dripsey Castle Estate, selling for twice its assign price in 2023 to make €5.85m, and apartment no 16 in the period Blackrock House, which made €1.35m in 2024.

Seven-bedroomed Ravenscourt House, Mr O’Sullivan says, “is one of the most distinguished and elegant period residences to come to the market in recent years.

Ravenscourt's limestone threshold was restored by Quilter Stone, Listowel

“It exudes historic charm, while having all the comforts of modern luxury, on private grounds between Douglas and Blackrock. It’s a real statement home.”

VERDICT: Cork City doesn’t have many houses of this quality and late 18th century pedigree. After its up-and-down fortunes and various uses, including health board ownership, its vendors have made it a real home, too.

Having moved eight times, between Australia and Ireland and now shedding adult children (some are Oz-bound), the vendors say “we have another house, at least, left in us”.