Bank Holiday banker for €550k at beguiling Guileen

‘BETTY Boop eyes’ is how the owner of this wide-eyed, popping big dormer windowed home describes her seaside eyrie, a comfortable, all-weather bolthole in one of East Cork’s prettiest coves, Guileen.

Set just around the mouth of Cork harbour, eastwards over the headland from Whitegate and Trabolgan, Guileen is a winsome little cul de sac spot – complete with old thatched cottages – that would not look out of place in a further-west Irish peninsula, or in Devon, or Cornwall.

Chocolate box pretty, it’s a haven or a hamlet, sheltered from the worst of the westerlies, with a beach in two sections and slipway, and has only a handful of homes (perhaps three dozen?) , most of them modest in size, but boastful in terms of views, water proximity and with many in a state of tasteful renewal.

The owner of Bronogue House, Irish and with a decade as well spent living in the US – has put in several decades happily living year round in Guileen where she bought Bronogue House from a previous Saudi-based owner, has vastly enhanced it since, and also managed to create a private garden and art studio/home office right by the water’s edge, adding a whole other dimension to the property.

She’s now set to trade down, but is only moving 100 metres up the road to take on a build project on a compact site by a stream: “it’s too hard to leave Guileen,” she admits.

She’s put the 1,200 sq ft Bronogue House on the market with Midleton agent Adrianna Hegarty who launches the water-aspected home facing over towards nearby Inch beach and Poer Head at €550,000, knowing she has a rare offer to hand on.

Ms Hegarty had the nearby semi-detached ‘look-out’ cottage called The Anchorage further up the elevated, scenic shoreline walkway for sale over three years ago with a €355,500 AMV, and it sold for a tenner short of €480,000 and has had considerable extra funds spent on it and its grounds since by Dublin-based buyers.

New owners for Bronogue House could come from anywhere: east Cork? The city? Up country? Overseas? 

Any and all, most likely with demand likely to be driven by the fact it’s neat as a pin, has incredible unobstructed ocean and beach/rock reef views, a compact side garden and a larger, verdant one, home to happily growing echiums, fuchsias, palms, poppies, roses, shrubs and everything else in multitudinous pots in a charming cottage-style, bulwarked from the fishers’ pier underneath it thanks to stone gabion cages put in by this property owner years back.

The date ‘officially’ put on this house is 1908, but it’s surely older than that, likely to be contemporaneous to the several thatched cottages just up above it: one straw roofed one can be seen from a kitchen Velux in this vastly updated detached and extended ‘cottage’ where the the official E1 BER misleads as to the actual creature comforts,  within.

Reached up several large, external flagstone steps from a tiny access lane separating the house and its garden, the pristine property has two ground floor bedrooms inside its thick, insulated stone walls, smart bathroom.

Upstairs is a bright kitchen with island, sunny, tiny morning coffee nook on the ‘inland’ side and, across a half landing, a large double aspect living/dining room, with stone chimney breast, cosy carpeted floor and those twin very large, apex-shaped dormer windows, with their hypnotic draw to the waters beyond, like being on the bridge of some ocean-going ship, only safely at anchor, in beguiling Guileen.

VERDICT: Live year round in coastal comfort, without guile in gentle Guileen, in the house with the almost cartoonishly large ‘Betty Boop’ peepers.