House of the Week: Picture-perfect thatched cottage for €390k

Two-bed Fairgreen Cottage has stone walls dating to the 1800s and sits in lush gardens

Fairgreen Cottage, Ballynacoda. Pictures: Lyne Media

Ballymacoda, East Cork
€390,000
Size	92 sq m  (985 sq ft)
Bedrooms	2
Bathrooms	2
BER	G

Pretty as a picture on a chocolate box is East Cork’s Fairgreen Cottage, with thick stone walls dating to the early 1800s, and topped with the thickest of thatch, rebuilt as a labour of love over a three-year period in the early 1990s and, again recently rethatched in 2023, before this 2026 autumn’s property market arrival.

Deliberately harking back to a more romantic past, built on the fringes of Ballymacoda village on a bend on the road out to the sea at Knockadoon, the two-bed cottage was reimagined to the looks it has today by locally-born John Ahern and his Londoner wife Sue when they retired to East Cork, and unearthed a derelict ruin from overgrown scrub.

Having spent boyhood round these parts, John Ahern had left for work in London in 1960 and, with two boys reared in England, was able to retire relatively early with Sue with energy for a personal project, close to home and to heart.

For three years, the couple lived in a mobile home under a steep, almost cliff-like rise of ground on part of this 1.77 acre holding which they tamed and prettified. Yet, stand-out still now is the look, with steeply raised thatched gables and neat dormer windows under straw fringes which would find favour with the likes of 1960s ‘boy-band’ The Monkees.

“When I was growing up there were lots of thatched houses in this area,” John Ahern recalled in a house feature in these Property & Home pages in 2003 by writer Mary Leland, noting he had an uncle who had been an apprentice tailor to a previous owner of this home before his uncle struck out for Cork city to his own business.

Afterwards, the house served time as a card-school, before falling into disrepair, while after 1960 John worked in insurance in London but later recalled “for several years as a teenager I worked and lived on a neighbouring farm, and that house, where I was very happy, was thatched. It seems to me that those were more innocent times; I think of it as a more gentle life. And I always wanted to come back.”

They came back, as did this house to life with half door, stone floors, rough walls and romantic rustic sheen, inside deep red-hued walls under its eiderdown of thatch, looking more picturesque English than Irish ‘peasant’ in style.

Writing in 2003, and calling John ‘Seán’, Mary Leland observed "now, this house is a composite of actuality and ideal, being reinvented by what Seán and Sue have made from the stone walls, the rubble, the over and under-growth, the rotted timber and fallen slates that they found when Sue bought the land as a gift for Seán’s 50th birthday. What they have created is a thick- walled, tiny-windowed, half-doored and deeply thatched cottage, snug as a fairy-tale, and surrounded by lawn, field, orchard and rose-bowered fences.”

Today, East Cork auctioneer Adrianna Hegarty describes the labours of their love as an “enchanting traditional Irish cottage, full of character and timeless charm with many special features such as half-doors to front and rear, thatched roof, slate flagstones and pine ceilings. Set within beautifully established lush gardens, this distinctive thatched home combines its classic red-painted exterior and natural stone details with an abundance of greenery, creating a wonderfully picturesque setting.”

Weighing in at just under 1,000 sq ft, it has two first floor bedrooms under sloping ceilings finished in T&G timber, and two ground floor rooms with distemper finish on lime render and stone, plus has a bathroom on each level, heated by stoves and electric heaters: the BER’s a G and, our 2023 feature here recalled the Aherns had lived for the first eight years without an electricity connection as an experiment, in an early ‘off-grid’ trial mixing Tilley lamps, candle and stoves for heat and cooking.

The gardens include roses (natch), mature trees, spring bulbs, a secret garden, and storage shed to continue the good, simple life, within five minute drive of the coast, 15 minutes from Youghal 25 minutes from Midleton, and seeming decades if not centuries away from 21st century woes and wars.

[bactktint=start]

The Cork House Story by Frank P Ryan. Carrigdubh Press

VERDICT: So pretty that a painting of Fairgreen Cottage was used on the cover of a 2025 historical housing overview book by academic and chartered surveyor Frank Ryan, called The Cork House Story. Given it was a Quaker-run famine soup kitchen in the mid-1800s also, there’s a book in this house alone, and a new chapter waiting to be written.