Don't hold your horses in battle for Mallow's €2m Waterloo House

THERE are horses for courses up Mallow way on the River Blackwater... big style.

But, while many will associate the north Cork town’s Navigation Road with the now-100-year-old Cork (Mallow) Racecourse, there’s an equestrian place close to it that predates it by a further century: the rather special Waterloo House.

Dating to about 1815, Waterloo House has been associated from its very early days with the Longfield family of nearby and even more substantial Longueville House renown, which itself dates to the mid-1700s.

Various accounts say Waterloo may have been a dower house for the Longfield family, others say it was built for a younger son who wouldn’t have inherited the main estate: either way, it’s an impressive property, in a parkland like setting, with one sentinel oak tree in its acreage and paddocks put at as old as 500 years.

One of the grander Munster homes still extant, Longueville itself was remodelled in 1815, and had a stunning Turner conservatory added in the 1860s, familiar to many who might have visited and dined at that great 24,000 sq ft house during its hotel and hospitality days.

This summer it emerged that Longueville House was pivoting to accommodate more than 120 asylum seekers, having failed to find a find a buyer after being put for sale on 300 acres back in 2022, with a €7m price tag.

That price level put Longueville in quite the exclusive league, even for the River Blackwater region: in contrast, Waterloo House is within a broader reach, and on a more domestic scale, and is guided on its launch at an even €2m by estate agent Michael O’Donovan of Savills.

At that €2m sum, he is expecting interest in Waterloo House to mostly come from outside the catchment (even though Mallow has business wealth), and there are some serious studs along the river, such as Coolmore’s Castlehdye near Fermoy, and feels it will have a draw to those in the UK interested in a period home with ready-made equestrian facilities, with what should seem like an attractive £1.67m, or to US buyers who are extremely active in the Irish market, mainly coastal, but also period, in which case the dollar price is $2.17m — still not too severe looking for all that’s on offer.

Families after the Longfields included the Mitchells (on lease) who had links to the Duhallow Hunt, and Hope-Johnstones, who bought in 1946.

Current owners are the Beame family, after Waterloo House was bought in the 1990s by US-born, Canada-based software developer and entrepreneur Carl Beame who embraced Mallow and Munster life and who continued to maintain and enhance this 200-year-old property package.

Carl Beame had come from a proud US democratic background: his grandfather Abraham D Beame, with Polish roots, became the 104th Mayor of the City of New York in 1973 (as that city’s first ever Jewish mayor), inheriting a fiscal city mess, close to bankruptcy and in debt to the tune of as much as $1.5bn: when he handed over to Ed Koch in 1978, the finances were back in the positive to the tune of $200m.

The next generation of the Beame clan established residency in Canada and, in Carl Beame’s case, in Cork too.

The family are now selling to trade down at Waterloo, and have maintained an equestrian link throughout recent decades, breeding and owning racing horses, with numerous boxes and tack rooms, stallion stables, as well as a quite enormous 2,500 sq m indoor arena, created after the Beames asked Millstreet’s Noel C Duggan to create a large shed enclosure around some outdoor stables.

That all-weather whopper is in addition to an inner and outer courtyard behind the main house, and some other unused and now unroofed lesser stable structures.

Horses still feature heavily here, currently grazing in paddocks in front of this early 1800s property, or riding up and down the long approach avenue from the discrete main entrance on the N72 Mallow/Killarney road about 5kms west of Cork Racecourse.

It’s a slow, steady build from that low key, electric gated entrance, first passing by the turreted gate lodge with rounded, squat tower like section, a fully-self-contained two-bed home of immense character which has been rented out on and off, and which adds to Waterloo’s accommodation options along with a self-contained, one-bed apartment in one of the courtyard clusters.

There’s about a half a kilometre of private avenue between the lodge and the house itself, a stuccoed five-bay over-basement house with pillared porch and pediment around the roof: almost out of sight on arrival are the banks of solar panels above the façade on the roof and which handily feed into the very effective central heating system, blowing warmed air into the room via vents in floors. If it works in chilled Canada, why not in more mild Munster?

The house is over 6,500 sq ft, so it’s not at all too huge to handle for a family, and has side projections like pavilions left and right, with a late 19th century addition also on the left, slightly throwing the original symmetry.

Inside, it’s in very well-kept order, with gentle upgrades only in deference to its period roots, with decorative ceilings and wall plasterwork, much of it picked out in gilt tracery, with an asymmetry again in the rooms, where the main reception is to the right, linking to a very large dining rom in the latter-added block which, in turn, leads to a very hospitable kitchen, in an annex room converted, now with beamed and vaulted ceilings, warmed by an Aga.

Next to it is a cosy sitting room with vintage stove, alongside a covered deck area overlooking one of the walled gardens: it’s the woman of the house’s very favourite spot.

Across the hall is a billiard/games room, with three-quarter size table and a large Canadian shuffleboard, all very clubby and gentlemanly, even more so linking to a slightly darker private bar in a room behind it, bedecked with sporting prowess photographs spanning several codes, from rugby to horses, and continuing an easy circular space throughout the ground floor which also has service rooms: laundry, pantry, guest WCs, etc.

That’s in addition to a substantial basement, a bit of a timepiece with old terracotta and flagged floors, with good head ceiling heights, and it is bright thanks to windows by a moat/separate from exterior ground level. Rooms here include a large weights room/gym, store, wine cellar, plant room, etc.

The top floor, in contrast, is fully used, home to six bedrooms, several of them double aspect and three bathrooms, all reached by a graceful cantilevered staircase from the central hall.

Floors at ground level have been replaced decades ago in oak parquet and other hardwoods, interior décor is age-appropriate, windows are sash with shutters; it’s the real deal, right down to the dogs languishing around the place.

Waterloo House is, in fact, a multi-layered attraction; the period house will appeal to purists.

The equestrian facilities are a huge attraction for a more specialised niche and could support an equestrian business/stud operation with more land leased and the proximity to Cork Raceourse is a bonus, as is a setting less than hour from Cork city, and its international airport and ferry port, on a good day.

Cork Savills agent Michael O’Donovan is joint in this sale with Savills country homes/equestrian expert Josh Pim.

Waterloo also has a Blackwater (the ‘Irish Rhine’) river cachet, plus history and heritage, through links to Longueville/Longfield family, and the house is even predated by the remnants of a canal by its lodge entrance. This canal was started in the 1700s to link with navigable sections of Blackwater to ship coal from coalfields near Kanturk down to Youghal: hence Mallow’s ‘Navigation Road’. The canal never got completed or used, but a large lock by Longueville House today still show the scale of 18th century ambition.

This house is dated in most accounts to 1815, the pivotal year of the Battle of Waterloo when Napoleon was defeated by the Duke of Wellington, where as many as 20,000 men (and thousands of horses) perished.

There’s a tale that Waterloo House’s landscaping was laid out, mounded and planted to recreate the topography of the Battle of Waterloo, even if the N72 today fringes the 52 acres of good Munster land to the south rather than some new EU-funded Belgian highway.

(Waterloo shares the Longfield family’s Latin crest on a roof pediment, ‘parcere subjectis’, meaning ‘spare the conquered’.)

There’s even more to appeal, to those who love land and its possibilities (other than battlefields) and Waterloo House has up to 52 acres of it, and the most beautiful of it to many will be the two walled gardens, to the east of the house, well-tended down through generations of owners, of various nationalities, and graced today by one of two original glasshouses; well, one is a rebuild of an original, at least, home to a still-ripening heritage tomato plants, a white grape vine (Longueville had its own vines too, on a grander scale, as well as orchards for cider).

At Waterloo, there’s also an orchard, where some fruit trees are as old as a century, a mix of eaters and cookers, a fig tree, cherry, peach and apricot, and even banana plants potted in the hot house.

There’s flower borders, lawns too, and secure play areas for grandchildren, all fringed by mature trees and yews and box hedging and there’s even the outline of a sheltered tennis court, for those who want to hold court, in style.

VERDICT: A stable environment for horses, and humans, understated Waterloo House is worth doing battle for