Douglas Road home Tigeen for sale at €1.35m with huge site and prime location

On Douglas Road, Tigeen offers 203 sq m of space on a 0.46 acre site, with scope for upgrades

Fri, 12 Sep, 2025 - 00:05

Catherine Shanahan

Douglas Road, Cork city
€1.35m
Size	203 sq m (2185 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	F

‘Tigeen’ is a bit of a misnomer for this Douglas Rd whopper — a more sensible choice would have been An Teach Mór.

Lovers of the mother tongue will know that adding the suffix ‘ín’ makes something small even smaller — buachaill/boy, buachaillín/little boy. Maybe the meaning was lost in translation, from Tighín — small house — to the anglicised Tigeen?

What won’t be lost on prospective buyers is the scale of the triangular site this faux-Tudor home is on - 0.46a - and the stellar location it is in.

Even though it borders a busy commuter route that delivers myriad kids to a multitude of schools, and countless shoppers to Douglas village, it’s cocooned behind high walls and decades of lush, matured planting.

With every conceivable convenience on your doorstep — schools, swimming pool, sports clubs, public transport, playgrounds, large greens, and masses of retail — it’s tailor made for family life.

The last family to live at Tigeen bought it in 1986 and did a heap of work at the time, installing new windows, upgrading the heating, and doing various bits of electrical work. They also added a large, south-west facing sunroom in 1996.

“The people we bought it from were a banker’s family, the Murphys, and they were moving to New York, that’s why they sold the house,” the current owner says.

“They had built on the kitchen and the dining room.

She believes the house was designed by an architect of the name Jim Buchan. A Walter James (Jim) Buchan architect is referenced in Tom Spalding’s book Designed for Life: Architecture and design in Cork city, 1900-1990.

The entry says he was born in 1900, in Mallow, and won a prize for design in the Cork Municipal Schools Authority in 1921. He later served in both the First and Second World War and was the clerk of works on various building sites linked to the Irish Soldiers and Sailors Land Trust.

During his career, he partnered with various Cork architectural firms and did work for Murphy’s Brewery and Guinness. He worked occasionally with former Cork City architect Neil Hegarty. He died in 1991.

Whether he was the same architect that designed four-bedroom Tigeen was not possible to confirm, but what the owner could say is that an identical house, also called Tigeen, was built on Baltimore Rd, just outside Skibbereen.

What the owner had no doubt about was what a fabulous home Tigeen was for their children to grow up in

“The kids from neighbouring Woolhara Park and from Knockrea would all be in our garden playing football, climbing trees, playing chasing,” she says.

“It was so private and secluded and they had a wonderful time.”

If it all got too much, the kids could be sent packing to the nearby Japanese Gardens, more or less over the wall from Tigeen, where there’s a great big green to play on, as well as a formal playground.

In 2024, a multi-use games area —basketball hoops and soccer nets — was installed and in the last week or two, a concrete table tennis table materialised. There’s a public swimming pool too, heavily utilised by a number of swimming clubs — swimmers would love Tigeen’s proximity to Gus Healy pool. An evolving community garden near the pool has utterly transformed a former patch of wasteland.

There’s no denying that Tigeen is in a good neighbourhood and the money people pay to live in the area reflects that.

Large, detached homes are plentiful in the area

In the past year, three Douglas Rd homes sold for more than €1m. One sold for considerably more: Sans Souci, a new-build replacement of a 1928 original went upwards of €2m, right up to €2.25m — the deal done in five months. It’s a contemporary gem, on a site smaller than Tigeen’s.

The buyer of 203sq m Tigeen will have considerable work to do. It was a rental for a number of years, but was freshened up ahead of market launch.

A spacious home in gorgeous grounds, it needs a good deal of modernising and improvements to energy efficiency — currently an ‘F’ — and to the layout. There’s plenty room to extend, if new owners wish to do so, and more could be made of a three-room attic conversion, currently suitable for storage.