House of the Week: Top of the charts status for €950k Model Farm Road home

Just over the back wall of 9 Hill Farm Avenue is the grave of guitarist Rory Gallagher who died in 1995

9 Hill Farm Avenue, Model Farm Road

Model Farm Road, Cork city
€950,000
Size	198 sq m (2,130 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	4
BER	C1

Number 9, Hill Farm Avenue is next to greatness: Just over the back wall of its lovely, mature rear garden is the grave of the late and great guitarist Rory Gallagher, who died in 1995.

His headstone was modelled on the Melody Maker magazine ‘International Guitarist of the Year’ award he’d received in 1972. Rory and his mum, Monica, had a good eye for property around Douglas after the family relocated to her native Cork from Donegal.

Cork’s then ‘outer’ western suburban scheme, Hill Farm, had started off in the high notes of the Celtic Tiger era of the early-2000s, when the Model Farm Road was already a long-established property hot-spot. Today, after a spell singing the blues, the address is back to ‘top of the charts’ status with recent sales up to, and over, the €1m price mark.

Despite the location’s primacy, and the house package offer, Model Farm Road’s Hill Farm sales slowed, then stalled, before getting a fresh pick-up.

Initially a development of 24 detached homes designed to a sort of timbered, Edwardian palette, delivery came along in small batches, instanced by the first half-a-dozen, which sold likely in the €600 k+ league.

The market crash of 2008 put the kibosh on any chance of a smooth house delivery, and early buyers did indeed have a bit of tumbleweed in their development’s vista for a while.

Hill Farm got back in to a second gear around 2012, when a half-dozen new-builds came for sale, priced at €550,000, and the Price Register shows five sales from 2013 to 2016 at a west-facing section called Hill View Close, making prices from €510,000 (No 5, in 2013) up to No 6, which sold for €575,000 in 2016.

Next up were six semi-detached homes in on the opposite/original side of Hill Farm, continuing on after the detached and long-built No 10 Hill Farm Avenue, again offered in the past year or so by agents Casey & Kingston, who this week report five completed homes of c 1,800 sq ft sold and occupied, with the sixth and last under offer. (The only one of the five yet showing on the Price Register is No 12 Hill Farm Avenue, at €749,999 by May of this year, bringing this chapter to a close. The six semi-ds have been advertised as being 2,300 sq ft, as they have optional use of 400 sq ft of building-regulation compliant attic space, so are larger than the original two-storey detacheds.

Resales of those older/original and larger detacheds here haven’t come along, until No 9 popped up in the past week: Thus, apart from normal market demand among active home hunters, there may be a curiosity factor in a wider circle of Model Farm Road aficionados to see what they’re like.

The evidence from the arrival of No 9 is that they have a lot going for them: No 9 has five bedrooms, with the main one en suite with a walk-in robe/dressing room, and the main family bathroom has a jetted Jacuzzi bath, while bed five is sort of home-office-sized.

There’s 2,130 sq ft or 198 sq m inside over two levels, and the ground floor has a sitting room with bay window and open fireplace on one side of a hall, accessed off a rear/central kitchen that links to a front-facing dining room. Off to the right of the hall is a full-depth living room, about 25’ by 12’ with chimneypiece, and there’s a west-facing conservatory, reached through double doors.

Selling agent for No 9 Hill Farm Avenue and its long-time occupants is Brian Olden, of Cohalan Downing, who prices it at €950,000.

First viewings were due at the end of this week, and feedback is awaited, but Mr Olden says, “It’s got a very good footprint and is in excellent condition.”

It has a brick-and-dash exterior, with Edwardian-style timber, high-front gable in its asymmetric and ‘easy on the eye’ façade, so is pretty low maintenance, with PVC glazing and gas heating. The BER’s a C1, pretty much par for the course and era of its build (some neighbours have upgraded BERs, after installing solar/PV panels, an option for No 9’s next occupants also.

The layout is on the more traditional end of the scale — open-plan living sort of came a few years after Hill Farm started its design trajectory, so there’s plenty of compartmentalised rooms on its two levels, albeit individually well-placed.

The back is west-facing, with a wide, high-quality limestone patio, overlooked by the kitchen, sun room, and a utility room — possibly not the very best placing for it, given the favourable aspect for ‘higher value’ room uses in the future?

VERDICT: A garden corner holds a good-sized timber shed, and No 9 is notable for the quality and maturity of its gardens, both front and back, with an array of trees, shrubs, and beds, and with off-street parking on a gravel drive, ringed by brick with a brick paved path to the front.

The rear boundary wall with St Oliver’s Cemetery is also brick-topped, with the distinctive grave and marble and brass headstone of world-class guitarist Rory Gallagher not A Million Miles Away, on the side other side of that wall.