House of the Week: Earls Well that ends well?

A €1.15 million four-bedroom home on 0.4 acre site in Waterfall

Thu, 12 Mar, 2026 - 17:45

Tommy Barker

Waterfall, Cork
€1.15m
Size	213 sq m (2,300 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	4
BER	A2

Just two years after returning to Ireland and buying a brand new home in a semi-rural setting, the young family at Waterfall’s Earls Well are retracing their steps, all 11,000 kilometres of them. They are set to jet a quarter way back around the world for new job opportunities, back to the densely populated city state of Singapore.

Moving to Ireland from Singapore, the couple (she’s from West Cork, he’s from Germany) and young child bought 39 Earls Well back in 2024 in steadily-evolving Waterfall, just west of Cork city.

Now served by a bus route, once-rural Waterfall developed a reputation for big one-off homes on country sites from the 1980s, and was and still is much favoured by CUH medics and UCC academics. It was then eyed up by developer John Fleming 25 years ago, initially with his c 60-house Heatherfield scheme of big, five beds builds, later followed by the 40+ in Earls Well.

The location’s now, effectively, a low-density but high end commuter suburb, with several hundred other more homes and apartments being developed between Bishopstown and Marymount at Waterfall Heights and adjacent fields, marking a rapid evolution from historic small rural settlement (once on the old West Cork rail line) to becoming an edge of city outpost.

Heck, even No 39’s Eircode has a south city ‘T12’ link to it, even though it’s a kilometre or two west of the city/county boundary, notes estate agent Michael Downey of ERA Downey McCarthy, who is handing the sale of the walk-in order 2,300 sq ft contemporary-style four-bed home on a 0.4 acre site.

Mr Downey guides No 39 at €1.15 million, and the €1m barrier has already been breached five times at Waterfall, with two house re-sales in John Fleming’s Heatherfield making €1.05m (No 31) and €1.25m (No 38), while ERA’s Mr Downey also last year got €900,000 for No 52, (albeit needing a good bit of work and freshening up).

A trio of new house sales in Fleming's latter development Earls Well made €1m (No 34) or more: No 38 was bought new for €1.125m and No 42 fetched €1.129m, all in 2024 when the Price Register shows No 39 making an even €825,000 also in '24.

While John Fleming had started Earls Well just prior to the ‘crash,’ with a handful of spectacular show homes, it later went into a receiver’s hands via Nama, and the latest completing section of the crisp looking detacheds was carried out by O’Callaghan Properties.

The buyers of No 39 made their own changes, removed one wall at the back for a more open and bright south-aspected kitchen/living/dining by a big patio, also picking flooring, built-ins, sanitary ware and the very sleek all white kitchen, built in bar/coffee dock and its veined stone island by Clohane Wood Products, who also did detailing in the porch/boot room, built ins etc.

That main space is large, at nearly 12’ metres by six metres, and so elsewhere at ground there’s only a utility, hall/boot room and a study.

The BER’s an A2, heating is air to water heat pump with heat recover (underfloor at ground, under slate effect time and engineered wood boards).

A soft, padded carpet lead to the first floor where three of the four bedrooms are also carpeted, and two are en suite, well-tiled with freestanding bath in the main family bathroom.

For home under at the ‘premium’ end of the market, there’s little to do here bar move in and perhaps do some landscaping planting, while the 0.4 acre site has had hedging planted at the boundaries so the outline’s now in place.