Great farmhouse revival or knock and rebuild at €600,000 Model Farm Road home
Source: Irish Examiner
TO KNOCK or not to knock -- that is the question for anyone looking at Laurel Bank House, an outlier in terms of Model Farm Road homes, but the kind of property that could shine in a Great House Revival-style makeover.
Anyone who saw the first episode in the popular TV series, which has just returned to our screens, will have been gobsmacked by the masterly restoration of the former Parson's House in Churchtown, North Cork, where a young couple did a magnificent job of creating a modern home in the shell of a gorgeous stone-cut Georgian building.
A testament to their own hard physical labour and chutzpah, the house is a living, breathing example of how ancient and graceful can trump shiny and new - if you're prepared to put the work in. This young couple did, over the course of a year-and-a-half, confounding both viewers and architect-presenter Hugh Wallace by coming in substantially under budget.
When ordinary folk like those two demonstrate that anything is possible with old homes, you'd have to pause for thought vis-a-vis Laurel Bank House.
Do you knock this old traditional farmhouse, the original farmhouse of Murphy's Farm, around which hundreds of acres of land were sold off over the decades to facilitate the building of hospitals, homes, and sports grounds, or do you preserve it and re-work it in a manner mindful of its history, while at the same time creating an attractive, practical home?
For inspiration, you could shimmy through the hedge at the bottom of the garden and take a gander at Ardbeg, a house that featured in these pages three years ago. While it has some Victorian sensibilities, in fact it's only about 25 years old, having replaced an early 1900s dwelling after new owners demolished the original at the start of the millennium.
It made more sense to the couple that bought it to knock and rebuild, so they did, but instead of going all-out modern, they created a period-style, country house feel. It did extremely well when it re-sold in 2022, making €1.56m, from a guide of €1.45m.
At Laurel Bank House, for a buyer who decides to knock it, the tedious planning bit is already done.
Full permission is in place for a 260 sq m, four-bed detached property, which would replace the existing 136 sq m four-bed, one-bathroom house. There's plenty of room to do so as it's on 0.148 acres in Laurel Bank, a leafy cul-de-sac just off Model Farm Road, by Highfield Lawn and Convent Avenue.
Its location is what sold it to the current owners who've had it for the bones of 40 years and who enjoyed its proximity to schools such as St Catherine's Girls' Primary School, Mount Mercy Girls Secondary School, Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh Boys Secondary School, not to mention third-level colleges such as University College Cork and Munster Technological University. It's near hospitals too and amenities such as the Lee fields.
Selling Laurel Bank House is Ray Sweetman of Casey & Kingston and he says the location is "outstanding" in an area particularly attractive to medics given how close it is to the back entrance of Cork University Hospital.
It's near the reopened Rendezvous too, where former Les Gourmandises chef Pat Kiely is keeping the gastro-pub fires burning.
The guide price for Laurel Bank House, which comes with parking, is €600,000.
VERDICT: Stellar location. Not even Blackrock Road can outdo Model Farm Road when it comes to €1m-plus house sales. See the Property Price Register since 2022.