House of the Week: Architect Jim Carroll left a lovely legacy in Sunday's Well at €575k Carriglee

The period property at No 29 Sunday's Well Road has been masterfully restored

Carriglee is in a row of Sunday's Well homes with views across the River Lee to the Cricket Grounds and tennis club.

Sunday's Well, Cork city
€575,000
Size	213 sq m (2,293 sq ft)
Bedrooms	2
Bathrooms	3
BER	C3

BUILDERS and engineers rubbed shoulders in the busy parade of viewings this fine Sunday’s Well home generated when it last came to
market around 30 years ago with a €60,000-plus guideline. Propertyknows this because the house featured in these pages when it was put up for auction in 1998. The successful bidder was a woman whose trump card was the architect she had up her sleeve.

“I loved Carriglee from the very first moment I saw it and Jim Carroll, the architect who looked at it for me, completely fell for it too, even though it was an absolute wreck,” the owner says.

Mr Carroll was hired to work his magic, which he duly did, re-imagining the form and function of the three-story home as a sort of modern-day duplex, without compromising its heritage a jot. 

Carriglee, pictured centre, has a duplex layout

A perfectionist, he went to painstaking lengths to keep it true to itself, right down to replacing a small coloured glass pane in a bathroom door with the exact cobalt blue hue of the original.

Restored banisters and a glimpse of the feature window with cobalt panes

Original banisters inside the entrance hall were
restored too, while a beyond-repair staircase to the upper level was replicated with the assistance of Cecil Whitford of Whitford Woodturning Designs Ltd, a former construction studies classmate of Jim’s at what was then the Regional Technical College (RTC) in Cork.

A real passion project for the architect, he restored original floorboards, shutters and sash windows, and exposed feature yellow brick hidden in the walls.

Exposed yellow brick in the double en suite bedroom under the eaves

 It’s visible now in the double en-suite bedroom under the eaves and also in the lower hallway, next to the main bedroom.

The owner says the yellow brick “came from ships used to transport butter” when Cork was a significant exporter. The bricks were used as ballast on the return journey, stashed in the hold where the butter had been stored, hence the buttery colour.

A door the size of a certain No 10

Tuscan redbrick courtyard

A courtyard inside the Downing Street-sized door off Sunday’s Well Road was rebuilt in Tuscan redbrick, picking up on heritage buildings in the neighbourhood, while on the south-facing side, above the river, is a patio and terraced garden, from where you can hear the weir in the river below.

The owner has documents that date the house to c 1846 when a chap by the name of Andrew Waugh bought the land from the McDonald family with plans to build five houses — but died before he could finish them.

They were subsequently completed on behalf of his widow, Eliza Waugh. Tragically, Jim Carroll didn’t get to complete his work either at No 29 Sunday’s Well Road.

South facing living room

Although the upper floors — the ‘duplex’ section — are finished to the nth degree, Jim passed away suddenly and never got to finish out the lower floor apartment.

Unfinished upper floor of the apartment with box bay window

The rest of the house is superb, from the 20-year-old enduringly modern
German SieMatic kitchen, to the luxury Italian Bisazza mosaic tiling in the bathrooms, to the stunning feature window inside the front door that brings the evening light in, through tiny panes of vivid cobalt and clear glass.

SieMatic kitchen

Bisazzo tiling

Other thoughtful touches — decorative and practical — dot the house, such as alcoves and lighting exactly where you need them to be.

View from Carriglee

Robert O’Keeffe of Irish & European is handling the sale and given the quality of the property and its location — close to UCC, the Bon Secours, and Cork University Hospitals — he expects to see medics and academics.

VERDICT: Hopefully the buyer will follow the architect’s lead and finish out the house as meticulously, whether they decide to incorporate the basement and overhead space — with a box bay window that’s crying out for restoration — or whether they press ahead with the plan for an apartment. 

Either way, the house stands as a lasting legacy of Jim Carroll’s architectural vision.