Aghada's Well House: Award-worthy East Cork home listed as owner launches luxury yacht business

A bespoke architect-designed home in Aghada is for sale as its owner embarks on a new sailing venture in Thailand

Well House Aghada. Pictures: Nathan Burke

Upper Aghada, Cork Harbour
€675,000
Size	213 sq m (2,300 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4/5
Bathrooms	3
BER	B3

There's a risk, as well as rewards, from following your dreams.

In the case of sailor Vince Donnelly, who to date has skippered luxury craft in over 100 countries in high seas and turquoise waters, it now means selling the home he designed and built to purse his next life chapter dream.

“Aghada Dream” might very well sum up the drive of the Aghada-born Cork man who took to the waters of Cork Harbour as a teenager, who trained as an architectural technician, set up his own design and planning practice in the 2000s, and, when the big crash came in 2008, he pivoted his life around, and, well, sort of ran away to sea.

Some 18 years later, and with tens of thousands of nautical miles under his belt and still with keen focus, Vince’s next move is to build a new charter business, starting in Phuket, Thailand, with a 53’ Ceycat six-cabin/12-person luxury catamaran coming to the end of its fit- out stage, ready to start new adventures from December.

To fund his share of the new business, it means selling his 2005-built home called Well House and, as he tells the Irish Examiner: “I know the goal, I’m just not sure of the exact route to it.”

(Don’t worry, he doesn’t mean boat navigation...)

Speaking of his own change of course in 2008, when he shuttered his own firm at age 25, Vince says that “having always loved the sea, I accepted a job as a yacht skipper in Greece”.

“Looking back that single decision changed the direction of my life.

“One opportunity led to another, eventually taking me through Europe and beyond until today.

“I lead the global sailing division of G Adventures,” he explains of the water-based career he built with the 1990-founded Canadian company G Adventures. (Its hundreds of itineraries cross over 100 countries, including trekking, safaris, cultural immersion, and the temperature range from polar expeditions to exotic warm water sailing, the latter being Vince Donnelly’s expertise, and his next peripatetic career step, via his start-up partnership in Longitude Yachting Solutions; see longitudeyachts.com).

The journey to Phuket (other far-flung and exotic destinations to follow) started in Upper Aghada, however, when a young and quite recently qualified architectural technician got his first lucky break, leading to The Well House.

He’d been working with timber-frame house builders, Healy Brothers’ Premier Homes before striking out on his own.

In the early 2000s, and in his own early 20s, he put down a deposit on “a modest new-build in Midleton”

But great luck and extreme decency, in the form of an older woman neighbour, stepped in.

“This amazing lady, who owned the site where Well House now stands, heard what I was paying for such a small home. She told me she wanted to give me a start in life and help me avoid taking on such large borrowings,” Vince says, almost still incredulous at what was to follow.

“She gifted me the land on one condition: That I would make a €20,000 donation to Cork Simon Community. It was a condition I was honoured to fulfil, and one which I have never forgotten.”

Well, well, well. Lucky Cork Simon. Lucky lad, and this home’s name came from an old, deep stone village well found on the site by the roadside, almost next door to Aghada National School on Upper Aghada’s School Rd.

“From that day onwards, the house named itself: The Well House.”

In effect a stepping stone to Vince’s new vision, the Longitude venture which he was so heavily investing in along with his husband Daniel (also an architect, from Costa Rica) and a previous partner Dave, an engineer who also joined G Adventures back some 15 years, Well House was launched at €695,000 via agent Dominic Losty, of Dungarvan-based Denise Radley Auctioneers. It’s currently under early and higher offer, gone of late to around €725,000, with current most serious interest from locally-based home hunters, Mr Losty suggests, though an eventual end-occupier may come from further afield.

At 2,300 sq ft, and dormer in form (planners favoured it at the time), The Well House manages to combine contemporary touches with cottage character, pulled off due to Vince’s design background and preferences.

Not too many people were putting in black window frames 20 years ago, now it’s pretty much “all the rage”.

Entry is via a set of painted solid wood double doors, leading to touches like a soaring 22’ high entrance hall, a lofted drawing room off the kitchen with 18’ high ceilings, and glulam beams, and main ground floor bedroom with patio access for sunny mornings coffees (Costa Rica’s favoured here) al fresco.

Pristine inside and outside, the ground floor includes laundry room, guest bathroom, storage closets, three bedrooms (main en suite) and principal bathroom.

Above is a fourth bedroom as well as a very substantial 40sq m open plan dormer room/option bedroom five/home cinema/office or recreational with-drawing room, aloft.

On a private half acre site, “it’s a rare fusion of timeless design, natural light, and refined coastal elegance in one of East Cork’s most sought-after settings,” says auctioneer Dominic Losty of this one-off listing above the Cork harbour coastal village where myriad waterside amenities including, naturally enough, sailing.

With the wind at his back and a course charted out in front, vendor Vince admits that “what makes leaving so difficult is that almost every corner of the house has a story,” adding “perhaps my favourite is the kitchen”.

When he was just 16, and clearly with a future career in mind, “a friend offered me several lengths of solid beech timber”.

“I had nowhere to use it, but I remember thinking that one day I would build my own home and that timber would become part of it.

“We stored it in bogland for years, allowing nature to work its magic as the timber developed into beautifully spalted beech.

“When it finally came time to build the kitchen, each board was carefully selected and ‘book-matched,’ so that the black fungal markings and natural grain created mirrored butterfly patterns across the cabinet doors,” he says, only hoping now that the home’s next occupant will appreciate the hand-crafted units and their provenance as much.

(There was enough spalted beech to craft a dresser, in Well House’s formal dining room, as well as the several steps down from the kitchen to the drawing room, where there’s also patio access.)

And, as it’s cast-off time now, “every time I walk into that room I am reminded of a promise I made to myself as a teenager,” Vince Donnelly appreciates, and says that his B3-rated home was kept ship-shape “throughout the years, even during the long periods my career took me overseas, it has always remained home”.

“It is,” he says, “filled with light, faces south, and was built to a specification that I hoped would stand the test of time. Every improvement, every tree, every feature has been part of a 20 year journey. Selling it really does mark the end of an era. We do not yet know where we will eventually settle ourselves, but we do know that leaving the Well House will be one of the hardest things we have ever done.”

VERDICT: No fear of cabin fever at story-filled, and lightly nautical themed The Well House … Aghada Dream, indeed.