€1.95k seaside home for all of the seasons

Seaglass is a stunning Sandycove home that feels like it’s right on the water

Seaglass in Sandycove. Pictures: Jakub Walutek

Sandycove, Kinsale,  Co Cork
€1.95m
Size	200 sq m  (2,145 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	2
BER	B

It's when they hear children counting backwards from ‘Ten, Nine, Eight’, and on down to ‘One, Jump!’ to cries of laughter, the owners of Seaglass know for sure it’s high summer and high tide — as it was this week when the Irish Examiner visited Kinsale’s Sandycove for a revisit.

The tide was up to the slipway in the picturesque cove at Ardkilly, youngsters were in and out of the water like seals, some in wetsuits, mostly in their pelts, while more seasoned adult swimmers over and backed to Sandycove Island, some rounding it, a half an hour’s circumnavigation, depending on tides and swimming abilities.

It’s a sound, and sight, the owners of Seaglass know and love. It’s also deeply familiar to this reporter, having often visited a grand-aunt called Bonne, at this very spot way back in the far-distant 1960s where she had retired to a tiny bungalow called Fuchsia, and where she kept a tiny punt for getting over to nearby Sandycove island.

That Fuchsia was eventually uprooted, in the 2000s, after being bought by a couple aged just in their very early 20s, Maxine Acton and Daniel Carey: by the time babies started to arrive, they decided to maximise the spectacular site’s possibilities, going for a total rebuild — bigger, better, and bolder.

And, while they changed the name to Seaglass, to reflect Maxine’s love of smoothly-rounded and ground-down glass of many colours found on beaches and including on their Sandycove doorstep, they kept faith with the earlier dwelling Fuchsia of old: that now-departed house’s stone-carved nameplate has kept a vigil by their front door, right up to today.

Having knocked and rebuilt back around 2008, the couple and now two teenage sons are selling to move on to their next life chapter, but are going to stay around Kinsale for sure, where Maxine has generations of family history, with her dad Robert Acton having had a hardware store in the town for many years (now running as a Londis). Maxine’s folks moved out to live at Sandycove while the Acton family was young, so in many respects she was only following her childhood path when they got the chance to buy. While her parents are on a higher Ardkilly/Sandycove site, Maxine and Daniel could hardly be closer to the water: literally throwing stones in the sea from their slightly elevated balcony is hardly a challenge — but, mind any swimmers below, or Sammy the seal, a daily and year-round visitor.

Will they miss the sea, its utter proximity? For sure, they say, but acknowledge the years they had here, the activity on the water, surprisingly so more for them than their sons, now aged 17 and 13, who are more into gaming and coding than wave-breaking and kayak paddling.

“They are like indoor cats,” quips dad Daniel Carey who founded the digital strategy company Like Communications in 2016 after a 20-year career in media and advertising (including the Irish Examiner in Cork, and The Sunday Times in London).

He and Maxine say it within in the lads’ earshot. Passive by their consoles and screens, neither digital savvy son demurs, almost purring like the family’s two real pet cats, one of whom the family note is able to go down to rockpools and land tiddler fish with a skilled swish of a paw.

The family’s regard for Seaglass is evident, even on a cursory visit, and they know its ever nook and cranny, having worked day one with architect James (Jim) Leahy to get it out of the ground, round about the time the Irish property market went into a post-crash spiral.

At the time, Maxine was working with developer Owen O’Callaghan and O’Callaghan Properties, and she credits one of the senior personnel there with giving her the sound design advice to round up a handful of houses which she liked (or, envied) and to use them for inspiration.

Turns out, of the five she liked, no fewer than three of the one-offs she selected had been designed by Jim Leahy: he’d delivered on a tough Kinsale town site by the Ramparts, as well as here in Sandycove, with a grass roofed tower on a large one-off, and which featured here in these pages many moons ago.

Surprisingly, there was little or no high drama in getting Seaglass designed and built, despite Maxine’s own current career in UCC where she lectures in the theatre
department, and is in her final year of a PhD in drama-based teaching for medical students: “Having worked with Owen O’Callaghan, and having a dad with a hardware store, I know a bit about property,” she says lightly.

Seaglass’s design saw the site of the old bungalow Fuchsia dug deeply into and going much further back, reducing the ground level. It now rises up with a lower/road level garage/boathouse and kayak store to the side, to allow for this far more substantial replacement, yet one whose top roof line is, she say, barely more than a metre above the old roof level of the also flat-roofed Fuchsia: design smarts, for sure.

Clever too is the way the rooms are stepped back from the front glass balustraded terraces so that, from inside, looking out on either of the two internal levels, you only see sea, island, and sky, not the narrow road directly beneath down to the slipway.

“We’re always asked if we get tired of the view, and the answer is, we don’t, never,” they say. By way of evidence, Daniel’s phone yields thousands of images taken in sunny scorchers, fair weather, storms, sunrises, and sunsets, with full moons rising over the island, of birds and seals and sailing craft, with buoy/markers visible past the island, used by Kinsale Yacht Club for races.

Never a dull moment, either, as the couple recall a French yacht mistakenly trying to sail into Sandycove’s shelter, thinking it was Kinsale harbour, only to fetch up on a rock....

A paddle boarder on the water at Sandycove, Kinsale, Co Cork in July. Picture: Larry Cummins

Seaglass isn’t only all about views, the style and the so-hot Sandycove setting (more on this anon), as it’s a supremely comfortable family home of over 2,000 sq ft, with living areas and bedrooms options on both floors, while passive solar gain means heating is rarely if ever needed, and cross ventilation allows cooling when needed too, with a very slight tint in the extensive glazing to reduce glare/overheating also.

A magnetically contolled pedestrian gate, next to a garage/boat store, opens to give access to a short flight of steps up to the house, with terrace/decking on either end, where the one to the right has a hybrid hot tub, much used, heated by a wood burner and kept hot under an insulated cover then at a suitably comfortable temperature by electricity.

External doors are in varnished oak, with some feature touches and have a hint of boat timbers. Inside, the main living area has an oak floor too, plus the open tread stairs are in oak also. The rise and turn to the first floor yields an increasing appreciation of a particularly tall window, unfurling the view over to the island and it resident herd of goats like a living art canvas: “It’s Jim Leahy’s favourite feature,” says Maxine of the architect’s (and artist’s) touches.

The architect’s skill shows as well in how two back bedrooms, one at each of the two levels, manage to get water/sea/views thanks to angled projections with windows place by a gable … neat.

A Sandycove somersault. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Each of the two bathrooms, one per floor, has a free-standing bath and what might have been an en suite to the best bedroom has been prioritised instead as a walk-in
dressing rooms/robe.

The first floor bathroom beside it has both a shower and oval bath, placed right by a window but, for privacy while soaking, has blind fitted which pulls upwards up from the sill, not down from the top of the window, adapted by suppliers and fitters Hillarys — sort of ‘bottoms up’ and the ‘blinds leading the blind’: why don’t they exist more widely?

Selling Seaglass is agent Brendan Bowe, from Kinsale, and he bills the architectural one-off on the water’s edge as “a truly stunning property in terms of its setting, outlook, great design, and its wonderful lifestyle offering, just a few kilometres  from Kinsale town.”

Mr Bowe adds it was “curated from an earlier, more modest residential offering in 2010 with a local owner who grew up in the area, knowing everything about the setting and the location and who in partnership with Leahy & Associates Architects designed a wonderful, front-line coastal home capturing everything that Sandycove and its setting offers”.

He guides Seaglass from €1.95m, cognisant of the quite recent surge in Kinsale, Ardbrack/Scilly, and Sandycove values, thanks in no small part to the buying sprees of a few US multi-millionaire/ billionaires.

One, James Berwind, has driven Sandycove into the stratosphere, assembling a land bank and portfolio of at least four local homes and land by the cliff walk/old Courtaparteen funeral path at a total cost well in excess of €16m, following his 2023 snap purchase of the Georgian villa gem Sprayfield House for a reported €4.75m and which he all but subsequently demolished.

Mr Berwind isn’t considered a possible/probably viewer and buyer for Seaglass, but there’s others out there, with money in their pockets and bank vaults … so just who will it be?

VERDICT: As stunning on a stormy winter’s day “when spray can hit the windows” as in high summer, so Sandycove’s Seaglass should go swimmingly indeed.