Glorious gardens in genteel Upper Rochestown's €1.35m home 

Dunany has settled beautifully into its mature surroundings

Dunany, Upper Rochestown

Upper Rochestown, Cork
€1.35m
Size	232sq m (2,503sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	4
BER	Pending

IT MAY sound wild in an age of chatbots, robots, driverless cars and delivery drones that sound and look like flying lawnmowers, but there was a time when having a landline was a meaningful consideration for home buyers.

Just as fibre broadband is on estate agents’ listings today, in 1970s-’80s Ireland, a fairly standard question for a buyer to ask was: “Does it have a phone line?”A working telephone connection was attractive to buyers at a time when households regularly faced significant delays in getting a new line installed .

It was the presence of a landline — essential for one of their jobs — that prompted the owners of this house to buy their first home in Rochestown, when they returned from working overseas in 1979. A decade later, having settled comfortably into the area, they set about building their own home.

Dunany, Upper Rochestown

We bought a site from a local landowner, and we hired Donogh O’Riordan of O’Riordan Staehli Architects (since evolved into Reddy Architecture + Urbanism) to design a house for us. Our main requests were for a low-rise home with a good flow between rooms on the ground floor.

The architect delivered on these two requests and also devised inventive ways of ensuring quality light levels.

Double height hallway

 He made the hall a double height space, with light channeled in via a trio of veluxes. Upstairs windows were configured as continuous roof-to-wall glazing to maximise daylight penetration. 

Novel window approach

Large box bay windows were added to the main downstairs rooms. 

Unique picture window

The pièce de résistance among the windows though is the triangular-shaped picture window in the living room that juts out to the garden.

It’s a striking architectural feature and at midsummer — which is just about now — “the sun sets right into it”, say the owners. Also notable is the circular opening set into the redbrick porch — a kind of open window framing garden shrubs.

The couple called their home Dunany to remind them of good times cross country skiing while living in Canada, where their base was Montreal, and Dunany was a small town an hour’s drive away where they rented accommodation.

These days the focus is on golf: the couple are both members of Monkstown Golf Club, which, from their Upper Rochestown base, is just a five-minute spin away. Their own lawns are as neat as a putting green, and beautifully planted, with both hardy annuals and specimen trees and shrubs.

 They’ve had months of glorious technicolour thanks to rhododendrons and azaleas, and hydrangeas are now on the way. It can all be enjoyed in any weather from the rear conservatory, off the living room, or from the fine-size south-west facing patio that was laid when the house was built.

Dunany hasn’t changed much in the intervening years other than settling very well into its now mature surroundings. 

The only internal structural change in the past 37 years was the removal of a wall so that the kitchen and family room are now open to each other. Outside, a detached garage was added, and a garden shed, and in the 1990s, the couple bought another piece of land that extended their 0.75a garden by 0.25a, enhancing privacy across what is now a one-acre site.

You can see Little Island Golf Club and a slice of Cork Harbour from the upper windows at Dunany and the Comeragh Mountains in the distance. As the property is in Meadowlands, Upper Rochestown, the view is over countryside, but it’s still no distance at all from Douglas — about 10 minutes by car. There’s a boys’ secondary school nearby — Rochestown College on Monastery Rd — and plenty more schools to choose from in the wider Douglas area.

Ann O’Mahony and Stuart O’Grady of Sherry FitzGerald are selling Dunany — the guide price is €1.35m — and they emphasise the privacy of the site, the uninterrupted views and the quality of the accommodation, which includes living/ dining/kitchen/ family room and conservatory on the ground floor overlooking the rear garden, as well as a cloakroom, utility, home office/ study, two guest loos and a boiler/ drying room.

Overhead, the main en suite bedroom has a walk-in wardrobe. All five bedrooms are doubles and all have casement window and rooflight arrangements, ensuring good daylight. Ceiling beams create a country cottage feel.

Given the generous house size (2,503sq ft), splendid gardens and the favoured location, Ms O’Mahony and Mr O’Grady expect two main types of buyer: families trading up and families relocating back to Cork.

VERDICT: A bright, attractive, well-maintained home in a lush and private setting. Feels like deep countryside, but is handy to Douglas village, the N28 and the South Link Rd. Should appeal to upsizing families.