West Cork's €1.2m Atlas House is just out of this world

YOU’RE in pastoral West Cork at Atlas House, as private as you’d ever want... but, once you go over the pristine threshold of this venerable, two-centuries’ old Irish country home, named in honour of the Greek god who bore the planets on his shoulders, there’s an interior quality that could be almost anywhere on our globe.

In any case, at this mythologically-named, tiny fraction of planet Earth, you’ve stumbled upon one of the best-finished homes to come to the Cork market in yonks.

Yet, despite its proximity to Clonakilty, to beaches, hidden coves, and being less than an hour from Cork City and its easy-scale international airport, once you’ve gained access, nobody will ever know that you are ensconced in creature comforts at Atlas House: It’s the essence of being off the beaten track.

Atlas House is set at Monteen, south of the N71 and Henry Ford’s birthplace of Ballinascarthy, near Ardnavaha House (a former glebe and, later, hotel dating to 1810), across a gentle plain from the 1850s All Saints CofI church, associated with the Bence Jones family of Lisselane House. Closer still stand the remain of Monteen Castle, a compact tower house.

While time has taken its toll on truncated Monteen Castle, now in a gentle state of decline, time seems to have reversed its movement in the case of Atlas House: It’s bigger, and immensely better, too, than ever before. Simply, it’s stand-out, and outstanding in its 11 acres of fields, and rising woodland behind the skilfully enlarged and upgraded home: it featured here, in these pages, previously, simply called Monteen then, and since renamed after it was bought in 2015, with the owners, locally low-profile, having had a deep attachment to the Atlas legend.

It was offered here back in 2006 at €1.2m, when owned by a French woman, during a frothy market time, and had been significantly worked on already: Ye gods, it even had a croquet lawn in front, for genteel grandeur, and extensively replanted gardens.

It had a price and acreage reduction by 2008, to €850,000, plus a change of agent, as the market and sentiment had cooled, and might not have sold even at that. The Price Register, which only dates to 2010, shows it sold in 2015 and surfaced at €575,000 on the Register in early ’16.

In the near aftermath, it got huge additional love and attention from its new owners, who invested heavily and also added on a modern wing on the side, pushing the overall size to over 4,000 sq ft, up a chunk from the c 3,000 sq ft we had reported on in the past.

The owners used the design services of West Cork-based Liam Bennett, for a more contemporary wing to Atlas House, working with contractor Cathal Dinneen, of Coolim Construction (take a well-deserved bow, Coolim), giving a stunning main upstairs, with triple-aspect bedroom with angled, sit-out balcony access (main pic) for rural view-soaking, fringed with clear glass balusters, while the private bathroom, behind a screening slender glass part-divide, has a cocooning, heavy white stone bath by a clear, tall window for countryside views, plus large, walk-in double shower inside the glass blocks embrace.

There’s also extensive built-in in this suite, and air conditioning.

Under it is a kitchen, with Aga, large island, dining area, and multi-aspect family sitting room in an open, irregularly-shaped, enormous room, with side, with west-aspected patio access via a large slider, and exterior clad in cedar.

Elsewhere, much of Atlas House’s external finish is exposed and repointed stone, done by skilled masons and, internally, there is a lot of exposed stone, also, yet without the substantial-sized house ever feeling stonily cold.

Different rooms set different tones: The entry hall is a vast, double-height space, with glass ‘bridge’ linking across the void, and with light getting in from front to back, with a slender feature chandelier a scene setter. The already-generous hall was made even more so by the build/design crew, who pushed out the back of the existing c 1820s era house, under a low-gradient, membrane roof/mid-section add-on, which improves circulation, and adds light.

Large art pieces and selected, framed posters, referencing personal and literary works, adorn walls, with the furniture a mix of traditional antique pieces, plus others with Oriental influences: it all adds to quite the cosmopolitan, ‘citizen of the world’ vibe for this expansive family home.

Left and right of the hall core are two old-world rooms, one described as a snug, the other twice the size as the ‘great’ room, and each having exposed-stone,

large inglenook-style fireplaces with stoves, with timber lintels/beams on jutting stone corbels in the larger of the two.

That ‘great’ room is where any owner/host will want to hold winter parties and Christmas-time soirees, with the stove blasting out furnace-like heat: in next hands, it will indeed be a Christmas cracker.

Despite the extensive, character-retaining exposed stone, the house gets a solid C1 BER, thanks to efficient oil central heating, with heat delivered throughout the entire ground level under foot, under wide plank-engineered timber boards, and the ’super suite’ main bedroom is warmed underfoot too.

Elsewhere, there’s a ground-floor bedroom/study, and the original far side of the house has three further, first-floor double bedrooms, two with their front-facing small windows typically and traditionally down near floor level, under sloping insulated rooflines (pic, above).

One of the three has a private en suite (in any other home, this would be the main grown-ups room, but it’s in the ha’penny place by the newer one, sort of a penthouse suite in its own right).

In contrast to that sharp suite, the far, original gable has a bedroom with a door to an external, original, traditional farmhouse-style stone set of steps, so there’s possible external access/egress options here for whoever gets this room (pic, right), be it a guest, a granny, an au pair, or an older teenager.

Opening this bedroom’s gable door reveals the sound of a stream running down the side of the rear, flanking hill, a water feature provided by nature, and this hill slopes up behind, heavily cut-back now for the winter, but showing the bases of mature shrubs, bushes and numerous gunneras.

Atlas House’s acres have relatively flat land/gardens in front, with lots of road frontage and several other access option to the large fields on either side, while a short drive past electric gates leads to the house’s gable, and a parking area by a detached one-bed garden room, pretty fully self-contained.

Oh, and for those who want to make their own mark or splash, planning permission has been secured for an indoor swimming pool in a structure that could be placed near the garden room.

Atlas House got a preliminary online launch at the end of last week and the reaction to it was near-instant, says selling agent Mark Kelly, of Hodnett Forde, based in Clonakilty, who expects overseas interest in the main. He guides it at €1.2m, about twice the reported c €575k that it made back in 2015, when it was not at all in the same size and quality league. The additional value of most of the land, c 10 of the total 11 acres, would have been on top of that recorded sum as the Register only values a property on an acre.

Atlas House has many West Cork amenities within a pretty easy drive, while more specific to itself is its backwater location up a lovely old back boreen, running up and down an unspoiled landscape and pock-marked by a variety of as-old, and older, stone buildings and farmyards, offering loads of privacy in return for lack of ‘profile.’ Writing about it in the mid-2000s, we said Monteen “would make an ideal writer’s retreat or health/ holistic spa:” it holds all that beatific promise once more, and more.

That seclusion and tranquillity clearly appealed to the owners since 2015/16, and will once again to whoever finds their way to it now, knowing they are getting a top-quality home for a fraction of the cost which a comparable build to this exceptional quality would make if it was on the coast, was in Kinsale or Glandore, or even had a water glimpse.

VERDICT: Well done to all concerned, especially builders Coolim who ‘shouldered’ this Atlas’ delivery: There’s an easy move into this rural retreat now at Monteen, via its rebirth as Atlas House.