House of the Week: €975k Clonakilty home overlooking beaches and dunes

Mount Seaview is a split-level open-plan home that gets morning and evening sun

Mount Seaview, Clonakilty. Pictures: Kieran Hayes

Clonakilty, Co Cork
€975,000
Size	200 sq m (2,150 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	C2

A visit back home to West Cork from the US for a wedding at the seaside hotel Dunmore House in the 1980s cost a then-young couple dearly, but it repaid them in dividends for decades to follow.

The pair had crossed the Atlantic, home from Boston for a holiday and to celebrate the nuptials of relatives. On the scenic coastal inlet road out from Clonakilty to the highly popular, family-run Dunmore House Hotel, they spotted a sign for a site for sale.

Perhaps filled with the romance of the occasion, and a familiarity with the location (he’s a Clonakilty man), they bought the site, but returned to the US shortly afterwards, leaving it untouched.

By 1992, and back home in Ireland, they were ready to build, and started work on a marginally split-level dormer, open-plan inside and with timber floors. “We were probably ahead of the trend in that regards, after living in Boston,” says the woman of the house.

They extended in 2009 when, handily, they were also able to utilise more glass to make better use of the vista on their doorstep, on the other side of the Dunmore Road, looking over the sandy tidal inlet to Inchydoney island and glorious section of beach and dune.

They soon had children, so not only was the extra space useful, it also helped to further bed down the family’s connection to the setting and the sea. On low tides, the children were able to wade their way over to the expanse of Inchydoney’s strands, with Blue Flag status and a surf school.

A son, now aged 24, qualified as a lifeguard at swim school there, and became a beach lifeguard for the summers, and his sister, now aged 22, also qualified as a lifeguard, and took up work at the salt-water swimming pool at the 1998-built, four-star Inchydoney Lodge and Spa Resort.

Built by developer John Fleming, the hotel and apartments put Inchydoney on the map and was built on the site of the early 1930s Inchydoney Ocean Hotel, developed by a Patrick O’Donovan.

The 1930s were also when another O’Donovan family decided to move from more inland West Cork, at Lyre and Ahiohill, just a bit north of Clonakilty, to buy a headland farm at Dunmore and Muckross.

By 1948, they got a bar licence, and began doing wedding breakfasts, starting Dunmore House off on its now-intergenerational O’Donovan clan life as a leading West Cork hotel and wedding venue to this day.

Recently taking over the hospitality reins from parents Carol O’Donovan and Richard Barrett, manager Peter Barrett, who trained in the US, Hong Kong, and Switzerland, recalls O’Donovan family lore of his great grandmother opining, when moving from Ahiohill to this headland, that “there’s nothing here but water!”

That water proximity is sort of the USP for Inchydoney and Dunmore House hotels, just as it has been for the
vendors this summer of Mount Seaview, a recent market arrival on 1.5 acres of sloping land long ago associated with Dunmore House.

The very well kept, 2,150 sq ft, four-bed dormer home is priced at €975,000 by estate agent Maeve McCarthy, of Skib-based Charles P McCarthy, who sold a smaller, modern build, at adjacent Rineen, over a year ago for €825,000, while the Price Register also shows a property called Horizon View, also nearby at Muckross Dunmore, selling earlier this year for €600,000.

Mount Seaview, Clonakilty

The vendors, now empty nesters, want to relocate back towards Clonakilty town and say “this home needs a family to make the most of it”, pointing out the extensive landscaping and level play areas which they created a number of years back and which get both morning and evening sun.

Also notable is a horseshoe-shaped, sheltered seating area by the patio off the sun room to the side of this
detached home, whose rear grounds slope up towards the former nine-hole golf course created at Dunmore House back in the 1960s, but which ceased play in 2022.

With three reception rooms, lofty sun room, country style kitchen, and four first-floor bedrooms (two en suite), this home has a mostly easterly aspect to the front, overlooking the inlet that leads up to Clogheen Strand Intake, with Inchydoney island on the other side, now all connected by causeways and which are handier for cris-crossing than wading... unless you just happen to be a confident young lifeguard.

VERDICT: More inlet and island views than open Atlantic ocean ones at Mount Seaview. What are the chances next owners might seek to open up the glazing even more, given what’s there to savour?