€2.25m The Poplars on rare 1.6 acre Cork suburban city site may be family home - or face development

COMMENTING on Cork’s conservatism in terms of housing preferences, a senior city planner once quipped that all anyone wanted was “a bungalow on an acre, within a mile of the city centre”.

Well, here’s a home that delivers on that unlikely prospect, only times-over.

Not only is The Poplars within a mile of the city, it’s far more than a bungalow, being a two-storey house, plus has an easy to access lofty, huge attic.

Oh, and it’s on over an acre and a half, weighing in on its private, wooded 1.62 acres of grounds behind electric gates inserted in 200-year-old limestone pillars and a discrete, non-flashy set-back entrance on Cork’s Douglas Road.

Now coming up on 30 years of age, The Poplars was built in 1995 as a one-off in the extensive grands of a one-time Georgian home, Villa Nova, which was bought maybe 60 years ago by a then-very successful Cork home builder, Denis McCarthy.

He built many hundreds of new homes across the southern suburbs, from Bishopstown, in the west, to Douglas, in the east.

He built the Bellair Estate in the early 1960s, on the road linking the city ends of the Douglas Road and the Ballinlough Road, just on the city side of his utterly private Villa Nova.

The original Villa Nova was demolished and replaced with the McCarthy clan’s own family home, cocooned on perhaps as much as six acres in such an exceptional setting.

The ‘new’ Villa Nova is still in McCarthy hands, and one of the current generation since delivered the Bellair Close mix of apartments and duplexes next to Our Lady of Lourdes girls NS on the Ballinlough Road.

Another member, daughter Adelaide, got a still-exceptional site of 1.62 acres removed from Villa Nova Mk 11, towards the front of the acres of the family’s adjacent tree-fringed grounds and gardens the size of paddocks.

She and her husband, Paddy McKeown, employed Magee Creedon architects in the mid-1990s to design the one-off build The Poplars, and now it’s for sale as Paddy trades down, following the death of Addie in 2022, and with their with offspring flown and fledged.

The solidly-built house has mainly double-aspect principal rooms, a double-height core, and very high internal ceilings as an important feature..., important because the original, ornate pine doors, and architraves and pelmets and trims of the Georgian Villa Nova, were salvaged and stored and got reused here in The Poplars. Here too quality hardwoods are a feature, in floors, stairs and rails, and even in the tall windows and double French doors.

Those magnificent rescued doors are at ground level only, and, keeping with the theme (the late Addie McKeown/nee McCarthy gave adult ed classes on fine art and antiques) quality stripped pine doors grace the first-floor rooms, sourced from salvage specialists Goodwoods, back in the day.

Coming to market now, as a so-rare offer because of the site size, it’s going to have developers and builders sniffing around, as well as well-heeled home hunters, who’ll have their Hunter wellies to hand and to foot for strolling their grounds.

Estate agent Sean McCarthy, of ERA Downey McCarthy, guides the house at €2.25m and says that “given the dearth of opportunities that arise in this central and much sought-after location, and the impressive, 1.62 acre plot size, this property will certainly be of huge interest to both the family home-owner market and the new residential development market.”

The Price Register shows eight €1m+ sales with a Douglas Road address, others off the road have topped it and the strongest was Knockrea Lodge at €1.8m. 

That’s about to be beaten, in spades, by the ‘sale agreed’ on the contemporary 3,000 sq ft Sans Souci, which featured here at the end of the summer for over its €2.2m AMV.

The utterly private The Poplars is across the main Douglas Road from the long-stalled ex-GAA Nemo Rangers density development site and is zoned ‘sustainable residential development.

VERDICT: With a pure gold location, The Poplars may broadly stay as is, and get a house upgrade? Be surrounded by a handful of detacheds as a low-density/high-value niche? Or see a higher-density scheme similar to Bellair Close, in which case it, too, like the original Villa Nova, will be knocked and replaced entirely….if so, the original Villa Nova doors here today will move on to a third iteration?

They’ll all hinge on who agents ERA do the deal with…