With this €2.35m Kinsale home, it's the view buyers are really paying for

The historic cottage's greatest asset is its elevated half-acre site overlooking Kinsale Harbour, where luxury rebuilds command multimillion-euro prices

A historic Ardbrack Cottage in Kinsale has gone on the market for €2.35m, offering buyers a prime harbour-view site with redevelopment potential.

Ardbrack, Kinsale
€2.35m
Size	187 sq m (2,005 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	E1

Kinsale’s elevated Ardbrack has long been the Cork home of the ‘just knock it’ school of thought — the location and views are pretty unchanging, yet existing bricks and mortar just can’t keep up with the spending power and ambitions of high-end house hunters.

“You’re nobody if you haven’t knocked and rebuilt,” was a local Kinsale quip as far back as the 1990s, when older builds started to fall by the wayside up on this elevated hill with increasing regularity.

In the decades since, that observation has come to be almost a commonplace, for this most uncommon of places, where the vista scans all of Kinsale harbour, views which are equally engaging and enthralling in all weathers (but sun’s best of all).

The Buckley family selling their much-loved Ardbrack Cottage are pretty sanguine about its future, quite aware that their parents’ pride and joy (and with a history going right back to the 1860s as one of Ardbrack’s oldest homes), is likely to bite the dust in the foreseeable future — the site is just so prime and prized.

How valuable the half acre Ardbrack Cottage is on has yet to be determined: the AMV via estate agent Lawrence Sweeney of Savills is €2.35m.

Although a decent chunk of change in anyone’s book, Mr Sweeney can be pretty sure of hitting it given the price levels regularly achieved at Ardbrack, with 24 €1m-plus sales to date, including one on the inland side of the road, bought for site value over €2m and which is now being demolished/replaced.

Next door Scilly adds a few more €1m-plus sales too, and holds the local record for Kinsale values, with three over €4.5m, led by the contemporary Seaspray at €5.5m.

Another recent Scilly listing, Prospect Villa, has a €5.5m asking price and may well be the next Kinsale record-setter given it has a commanding position in its own right?

Kinsale wasn’t really on the home-hunting radar of Dr Richard (Dick) Buckley and his wife Nan when they returned to Cork from Kent in England back in the 1980s, but “as soon as they visited it they knew it was perfect for them”, says daughter Nuala Leyden who was engaged as a home-hunting scout on their behalf at the time.

Nuala is the only one of the couple’s children currently living in Cork: having performed on the buying side back in 1987, she’s now is on the selling case in 2026 after the recent passing of dad Dick, aged in his 90s, and who was pre-deceased by Nan in 2014, and by son Richard.

The extended clan is sort of Cork academic, medical, dental, and sporting royalty, with Dick having graduated in medicine in UCC in 1953, and then— realising medicine wasn’t really his passion — went on to study dentistry in UCD.

The switch of discipline and city and province, only came after a sporting career in UCC when Dick was UCC and Intervarsity half-mile race champion in 1950 and 1952, and he was also capped for Munster rugby (wing three-quarter) and captained UCC rugby team in the 1950-53 period.

The UCC link was more academic on Nan’s side, as her father was Jack McHenry, professor of physics and, later, president of UCC from 1964-1967; with such heritage on both sides, it’s little wonder they returned to Cork, from the Kent dental practice Dick had set up there with his brother Mark.

“Dad was like a mafia ‘don’ at Ardbrack,” laughs Nuala as her folks had six children, 17 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, and the c 1,800 sq ft ‘cottage’ was where family life and friendship in all its joys was celebrated, with members into sailing, golf, and gatherings.

In later years, ‘Dr Dick’ had a social circle called after a vintage golf club, the Mashie Niblick, at Kinsale Golf Club, and the nickname will live on after him, says retired dentist Nuala.

She adds that her dad hadn’t let his loss of vision due to macular degeneration dim his spirit, or his ability to navigate his way around Ardbrack Cottage which had evolved over time but “looking at the heating bills, it was like he was heating Ardbrack”, she laughs.

Architects must love hot-spot Ardbrack too, given:

• You can’t go wrong with the prospect and panorama;
• The elevation and aspect is bang on, west in the main and south as well;
• Just about every site here has unobstructed harbour, water, and boating views, shimmering in sunshine and moonlight;
• Planners seem well disposed to allowing replacement dwellings, once design is of a high enough standard;
• Glass boxes are, well, not quite 10 a penny, but certainly on-trend, while diversity is also allowed.

Oh, and builders and suppliers must love it too, as nothing gets done on the cheap here!

The late Dick Buckley did his own due diligence a few years back, while trawling Ardbrack’s history, finding the whole hillside of Ardbrack selling for £500 in 1862, bought by a John Maxwell Steele, a baronet from Gloucester.

Steele must have done a profitable property ‘flip’ as deeds show a sale of 11 Ardbrack acres in 1864 for £925 to a Captain Adam Warren Perry.

Perry died in 1909 and his will stipulated that several of his bequests would be null and void if the recipient married or cohabited with a Roman Catholic.

Kinsale has clearly evolved since...

Later, Ardbrack Cottage was a rental, and it left Perry hands when sold in 1959 to Londoner Col Randolf Arthur King.

Next was a sale to EW Davis Goff, in 1962 for £4,000, and the evolving cottage found a native Cork buyer, Vincent O’Farrell in 1977, when he paid £40,000 for it.

See a price trajectory here? Only upwards, that’s for sure, towards or even past the €2.35m guide.

Vincent O’Farrell, who always had a good eye for property, sold to the Buckleys in 1987 for £107,000 and moved to Schull, and how many more multiples of that sum it fetches in the coming months for the Buckley clan - for whom it was priceless - is very much an open book.

VERDICT: Is Ardbrack Cottage the first home to appear in these pages without a respectful, almost room-by-room description and assessment?

If so, it’s no disrespect to it, but it’s not what buyers will be looking much at either, they’ll be looking to the site’s future, for sure.

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