House is a looker but the Brian Cross garden is the star at the €1m home where he grew up

Lakemount, above Glanmire village has a trove of botanical treasures, a glorious home and an apartment to boot

Lakemount, Glanmire

Glanmire, Cork
€1m
Size	233 sq m+ 45 sqm
Bedrooms	4+1
Bathrooms	3+1
BER	C3

Unlike Alice galivanting through Wonderland, no-one has to swig from a bottle labelled ‘Drink me’ to gain entry to the fantastical garden at Lakemount, even if it does feel lifted straight from the pages of a story book. Thankfully, every extraordinary corner is gloriously real.

Parents trying to instill a love of gardening in their children should know this can be the outcome: the late landscape painter and garden designer Brian Cross put down the roots of his career at Lakemount aged just eight and built on it over a lifetime. Every twist and turn, every gravel path, every Liscannor slab, every raised bed, every specimen plant, every ornamental grass and tree fern plays its part in this magnificently orchestrated landscape now on the market, above Glanmire village.

The house that sits in this rich bounty has plenty to flaunt also but doesn’t try to hog the limelight.

“I love that it’s not sitting proud, I love that’s it’s enveloped by the garden,” the owner says of the home she purchased with her husband in 2017.

“The garden is why we bought it, 100%. I fell in love with it,” she adds.

A potted history of its pedigree is as follows: Lakemount started out as a chicken and fruit farm, its sandy, acidic soil gradually enriched by decades of farm manure. The foundations of today’s garden were laid in the 1950s when Brian’s mother Peggy planted shelterbelts. Her eight-year-old son pitched in — and never stopped digging.

What started out as a childhood distraction became a lifelong obsession — and obvious talent — ultimately garnering Lakemount a clatter of awards and a Royal Horticultural Society acknowledgement as “one of Ireland’s flagship gardens”. Brian became a prolific garden designer, with many clients and commissions —one familiar to Corkonians is the Millennium Garden by the Port of Cork’s Tivoli base — and he also shared the delights of Lakemount, opening it up to gardening groups or hosting public open-day events to fundraise for good causes.

“So even though the gardens are extremely private, everyone’s mum has been here,” laughs the current owner.

She’s continued the tradition of occasionally opening the Barnavara Hill garden — by appointment — to tour groups or to wedding parties, who jump at the chance of being photographed against this unique and luscious backdrop.

A committed gardener herself, the owner understood the importance of preserving Lakemount’s hard-won legacy, and one of her particular passions has been growing fruit and veg organically in raised beds and greenhouses. She also keeps honey bees and in a nod to Lakemount’s heritage, she installed a chicken coop. The way the garden is structured, you never know what’s around the next corner (or down the rabbit hole), but you can take it that the one constant is beauty.

Even though the house seems incidental by comparison, it’s anything but. While the current owners kept the garden at Lakemount “largely the same” they went at the house full tilt. Several rooms were knocked into one to form a great big open-plan space where the rear wall is made entirely of glass and a huge glass door slides open to the south-facing garden.

You can imagine the view from the dining table or the granite-topped kitchen island or from the easy chairs by the wood-burning stove as you gaze down over the tiered outdoors to the lily pond and beyond, to the fiery russets and mellow yellows that hold forth this time of year. Who needs a still life when real life is this good?

The owner is an avid cook and much of what’s grown in the garden makes it to the kitchen table via the Lacanche, a traditional French range cooker known to range cooker aficionados as a four-oven dynamo. A pretty pale blue shade, it was custom-painted, a trend evident in much of the cabinetry at Lakemount, most of which was also custom made.

The owners have worked on the house for the past decade, starting with knocking down walls, after which 40 tonnes of concrete were poured to shore up weak foundations, followed by installation of underfloor heating. Any floorboards pulled up were repurposed for use in the open-plan living space.

“We re-did everything except the roof,” the owner says and they were fortunate to be able to live on site at the same time as the late Mr Cross had a free-standing studio apartment which they converted into what is now known as the ‘Little House’, with a not-so-little income stream of c €40,000 a year in Airbnb fees. It’s a tucked away gem with open-plan living, double bedroom, and wet room with underfloor heating, decorated by the owner who works in fabrics and has a very good eye for texture, colour, and design.

Tucked away Little House

Little House accommodation

That good eye is plain for all to see throughout the house:

It’s fair to say no corners were cut in the remodelling of this house, down to the reinstatement of cornicing and ceiling roses after ceilings were taken out to remove asbestos. It has new windows, new wiring, new plumbing, and an insulated “warm roof” attic with conversion potential. In fact it has new pretty much everything except for some original interior doors and floorboards which add character to a home already brimming with personality.

Family room with super garden views

Main bedroom

The owners moved the garden along too, growing their own and maintaining the handiwork of Brian Cross, with some tweaks such as “growing a mulberry pergola” over the large Liscannor-slabbed barbecue area, where they added a pizza oven, and the tree house which they added for the kids.

Auctioneer Johanna Murphy of Johanna Murphy & Sons describes the property as “a piece of heaven”. Who could possibly object?

Lakemount, Glanmire

“It’s truly unique and has the potential to serve many different purposes,” she says.

One of those is the potential to deliver a second home given the 1.9a site size and the existence of a separate entrance at a good remove from the entrance drive to Lakemount. There’s easily space for another home, albeit any development should respect the tremendous legacy of Mr Cross.

A passion for projects is behind the decision to sell up: Having spent 10 years at Lakemount, the owners final task was to install 20 solar panels last year. They’re moving further east now, to an even bigger project, freeing up Lakemount for its next lucky custodians.

VERDICT: The role of Keeper of the Garden is an important one at Lakewood. Whoever takes the reins will find themselves in Wonderland, without downing any potions.