€895K Blackberry Cottage in French Furze is ripe for the picking

Secluded Blackberry Cottage last featured in these pages in 2009, and has since matured nicely on the vine, writes Tommy Barker

5 Brookwood, French Furze, Crosshaven Road, Carrigaline

Crosshaven Rd, Carrigaline
€895,000
Size	205 sq m (2,200 sq ft)
Bedrooms	4
Bathrooms	3
BER	C2

There have been a few whopper house offers in the rather exclusive, niche, and wooded Brookwood, the last being in the €1.5m to €1.75m price bracket. So, here’s some ‘good’ news — a listing coming along at well under the €1m, under €900,000 even — count your blessings, and your change, perhaps.

Freshly launched to market at the end of the autumn harvest season is Blackberry Cottage, a 25-year-old dormer home that last featured in these pages just post-crash, at €740,000 for its original owners, seeking to move into nearby Crosshaven.

That was back in the summer of 2009, roll on 2026 and to this November and the buyers of the time are themselves now on the move.

And the price today? It’s cited at €895,000 by Carrigaline-based estate agent Michael Pigott, who again can expect trade-up family buyer inquiries and, there might even be trade-down interest also.

It’s a broadly traditional dormer home of 2,200 sq ft on an acre of mature woodland-fringed grounds, inside in a development of 11 one-off and strikingly different detached homes spread across 78 acres of precious woods, just above Drakes Point off the Carrigaline-Crosshaven road.

In almost any context, and by most people’s standards, it’s a pretty enviable sort of family home to consider, and has one of its four bedrooms at ground level by a shower-room, while up above one of the three other bedrooms is en suite: thus, there are lots of options and permutations of usage for a range of home hunters of a spread of ages.

However, it pales in comparison with the likes of Beechville House, a 5,040 sq ft five-bed A3 rated house also in Brookwood which featured in these pages in April of this year with a €1.595m AMV (via Lisney SIR). Beechville was bid up to €1.8m but that sale agreed didn’t close out, so now it’s freshly also back on the late ’26 market, once more quoting the original €1.595m asking price with the same agents.

Meanwhile a 2025 listing of the hugely impressive Tudor style Bramble Lodge, a B3 rated 4,200 sq ft five bed had gone for sale a year earlier than Beechville House at €1.75m (via Patricia Stokes) and at its finish level could hardly be replicated for its asking price. It no longer appears to be actively on the market, but hasn’t appeared on the Price Register.

A far wider market clearly will exist for Blackberry Cottage with its €895,000 AMV, with pretty much a low maintenance exterior too of brick across the front facade and dash to the sides and rear, painted on one gable.

The grounds, meanwhile, are mostly lawn, and sloping, with a decked section on an upper level near the back boundary to farmland and old hedgerows — the sort of natural stock-proof feature that surely gave both Blackberry Cottage and Bramble Lodge the origin of their names (the townland, meanwhile is called French Furze.)

Overall condition is very good for a late 1990s build, and our notes from 2009 when it was last for sale gave build credits to Crowley Brothers of Midleton.

Also noted at the time was the use of timbers for flooring such as ash and maple sourced from the Coolmore Estate across the Owenabue River from the dense and maturely tree-d Brookwood. Coolmore House itself is visible today from the Crosshaven road passing near Brookwood, and is set along the Currabinny Road: That 1770s period house featured in the 1983 TV adaptation of Molly Keane’s great Irish ascendancy novel, Good Behaviour … talk about provenance...

Here at Blackberry Cottage, those good woods are at ground level while upstairs bedrooms are finished in more prosaic pine boards, left exposed and varnished, gently distressed, and they also feature in the first floor’s family bathroom where a free-standing roll-top cast iron bath rests under dormer Velux window, ideal for a bit of star gazing on clear nights.

Harking back down the years also is a chunky-looking beam in old pitch pine spanning one section of this home’s rear-set kitchen, up on stone corbels but, given this home’s relatively recent construction is likely to be more for decorative rather than practical/structural purposes. Other timbers, meanwhile, include teak for the carpeted stairs, spindles and newels, teak internal doors, teak skirtings and teak architraves, while wood-burning stoves feature in the two main reception rooms, in the double aspect living room in a cast iron surround, the other’s in the TV/family/sitting room in a hearth insert.

Apart from the tiled floor kitchen/dining room with its painted units and metro tiled splashback with integrated appliances, other rooms include a study, plus a utility with units and tiling matching that in the kitchen, with access from several rooms at the back via sliding doors (wood-grain effect PVC) and from the utility room.

There’s no effective patio to the back past the surround path, but there’s a sit-out area adjacent, on gravel, ringed by salvaged old rail sleepers.

VERDICT: The berries. Verdant grounds and surrounds in a super-quiet setting between bustling Carrigaline and lifestyle-friendly Crosshaven and the amenities of Cork harbour.

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