What’s up doc? Cork’s €695k Ridgeway sure to be of interest to medics on CUH campus

HOME hunters in and around Cork’s Bishopstown suburb must be more than slightly conflicted right now, given the sudden choice of really well-located homes dotted around the sprawling CUH medical campus, and within a walk of UCC on the city side, and MTU just to the west.

There’s a handful of new stock at the Merton Lodge development on the Model Farm Road development, where four-bed 1,800 semi-ds have sold at €780,000 (larger detacheds sold for €1.2m/€1.3m) with three-bed semis there yet to be released.

Meanwhile, in Woodlawn off the city end of the Model Farm Road a three-bed 1,400 sq ft semi all done up with a B3 BER is launched this week at €700k.

Further, a five-bed 2,075 sq ft semi-d called Thomond in Firgrove Drive featured here last week, C1-rated and guided at €630k, while also launched was 3 Bishopstown Avenue West, a 1,500 sq ft four-bed semi-d, F-rated and guided at €575,000.

In the midst of this fray and wide array is the 1950 built Ceann Slé, or No 4 The Ridgeway which – for those with budgets at the bigger end of this price scale – may well be this summer’s ‘golden ticket’.

Why? Well, first up, it’s detached, so there’s an appeal in that alone.

Then factor in it’s on a corner site, with a large and mature back garden along the east-west spine of The Ridgeway, and it’s one of six similar detacheds at the entrance to a cul de sac selection of other Ridgeway homes.

Agent Mark Rose of Rose Property launched it in June guiding €695,000 and it’s currently at €730,000 in offers, having gone up in €5ks and €10ks to date.

The Price Register shows another Ridgeway detached, Moorefield across the road, selling recently for €830,000, above its May 2023 €795k AMV, and that was for a slightly larger home, possibly in better order, but F-rated in energy terms. Then, another Ridgeway house, Glengorm, has also sold strongly, making €790,000 in 2018.

No 4 The Ridgeway is presented empty for viewings, and has two reception rooms, one with a lean-to glasshouse to the back, a front office, rear dining area off a dining/kitchen plus utility/laundry and guest WC and above are four bedrooms and a bathroom.

No 4 will need work, but remedial underpinning/drains work has at least been done (subsidence is an issue plaguing much of Cork’s southern suburbs), so any spend now will be above ground.

It has just over 1,500 sq ft, and the site size and shape allows for myriad extension options if, as likely, its eventual buyers have a budget on top of whatever it ends up selling for.

VERDICT: There’s already a bit of elegance to this 75 year old Ridgeway home on quite big gardens.

It’s a racing certainty that it will be quite a different look again in a couple of years’ time by which time – gulp – total expenditure here well may be north of €1 million, which is what buyers of A-rated new build homes have been paying of late at Vailima and Merton Lodge on the Model Farm Road, and at Ecklinville, on Orchard Road.