Swedish fika adds to the fun of the Great Outdoors at €1.05m Cherry Lodge on Model Farm Road 

THE ‘great outdoors’ loom large at Cherry Lodge: The chap that lives there earns his keep from it, and, in more literal terms, the garden set-up at his Model Farm Road home has a great outdoors too.

The business from which Brian Fox - one half of the couple at Cherry Lodge - has made his living is Regatta Great Outdoors, a UK company founded by the Black family, who headhunted him 25 years ago.

With a track record in sportswear and outdoor wear retail, he became the Irish sales representative for the Regatta brand - and it wasn’t long before he spotted an opportunity to set up an Irish distribution network for the UK product. His first showroom was at the bottom of the garden in Cherry Lodge, where a garden shed was adapted in the early noughties.

“I had it slabbed and rails put in to hang the product and I used to bring buyers in from Blarney Woollen Mills and Elverys to show them the samples,” Brian says.

“They’d select the ranges to put in their stores. It was quite successful from the get-go.” By 2003, the business had outgrown the garden showroom and Brian leased a large unit at the nearby Westside Centre on Model Farm Road. Nowadays, it’s Regatta’s head office. Over the past two decades, the Irish arm of the business has grown exponentially. There are 35 stores around the country “from Bantry to Ballina”, with a “couple of hundred” employees. Sales are multi-platform: On the high street, wholesale, and online. The number of brands has expanded from the mass-produced “family affordable” Regatta range to upmarket multi-sport brand Dare2B, to travel-and-adventure brand, Cragghoppers.

Cherry Lodge, where it all began, has expanded, too. In 2005, Brian and his wife, Siobhán, added a sunroom downstairs and two bedrooms overhead. 

The decision to extend followed a change of heart about selling up. Having put it on the market in 2004, “because of a potential career move”, they subsequently withdrew it.

“When all is said and done, we love Cork too much, so we pulled it off the market,” Brian says.

Both of them are very much at home on Model Farm Road, as they both grew up there. Brian’s dad had an electrical shop in nearby Ballincollig and so his retail career began at an early age. The couple met in Ballincollig Community School and have been married 37 years. The site their home is built on was the last infill plot in upmarket Hillsborough Estate, which is near the Irish Guide Dogs HQ, towards the Ballincollig end of Model Farm Road.

“We built it in 1998 on a greenfield site, using direct labour, with a site manager and a QS. The architect was Denis Moran and he came back to do the extension for us in 2005,” says Brian.

When the extension was done, interiors guru Fiona O’Keeffe, whose USP is combining exacting standards with warmth and informality, came in to work her magic.

After some reconfiguring, a children’s room at Cherry Lodge was replaced by a well-appointed library, handsomely and comfortably furnished.

An understairs guest loo was added and a door from the hall to the kitchen was blocked off. The kitchen is now part of a generous, open-plan living space, which also includes a brightly-lit, relaxing lounge area with solid-fuel stove (extra big, took a week to install) and a dining area surrounded by the glazed sunroom extension, which overlooks the rear garden.

 The kitchen, reasonably compact, can be expanded if new owners wanted to break through to the adjoining roomy utility room. Siobhán chose not to, as she liked the idea of the children being able to enter the house via the utility and deposit damp or muddy outdoor wear in the laundry.

“As a family, we were always into sport, everything from waterskiing to wakeboarding. The place was always chaotic, wetsuits and wakeboards everywhere,” Brian says.

A calm has descended now that the two children are all grown up and living elsewhere. The couple probably has more time to enjoy the garden that they had professionally landscaped in 2015 and the stylish ‘fika’ that they built during lockdown.

An Irish twist on a Scandinavian tradition, it’s probably more shebeen than fika, given drinks are not limited to coffees. The principle is the same though, as the social aspect that underpins the Nordic ritual is just as important here. “Neighbours often text and ask if the bar is open,” laughs Siobhán.

Anyone expecting the kind of rudimentary interior you’d might find in a shebeen will be pleasantly surprised. It’s a sophisticated, fully insulated, fun and intimate space.

Outside the fika, the garden is beautifully landscaped, thanks to Siobhán’s cousin, Stephen Dempsey, a landscaper with Clockhouse Nurseries in Inniscarra.

Siobhán had ideas for where she wanted paving laid, but, in the end, he convinced her to go further.

It runs in bright, striking curves around flowerbeds, as well as forming pathways right around the lawn and up the side of the house and into the front driveway.

At the far end of the garden, next to the former showroom, the paving is up a step, forming a large, curved patio, an alternative sitting-out area to the deck at the opposite end, off the sunroom. External wall lighting wraps around the entire outdoor space The planting, also by Stephen, is richly textured. An expertly-chosen selection of shrubbery borders the front driveway.

Although Cherry Lodge is 26 years old, it has weathered well, thanks to careful maintenance, including the application of Everflex, an advanced exterior wall coating, which ensures durability.

“We haven’t had to touch it for years, it’s completely maintenance-free,” says Siobhán.

It’s a fact that there’s a “great outdoors” at Cherry Lodge, but the interiors deliver, too, with tasteful input from Fiona O’Keeffe. As well as the super open-plan kitchen/dining/living space and lovely library, there’s a front-of-house sitting room. 

Overhead, the main bedroom, in the extension, has a vaulted ceiling, a walk-in wardrobe, a large en suite and a balcony that overlooks the back garden.

“When we were doing the extension, the builder told use we’d never use the balcony and he said to send a text every time we did. He’s received many’s the text,” Siobhán laughs.

The remaining three bedrooms are doubles too, and there’s a second en suite. Finishes everywhere are high-end and the energy rating is a commendable B2, helped by 18 PV solar panels. Outside, there’s an electric vehicle charger.

The decision to sell 219 sq m Cherry Lodge is motivated by a desire to “rightsize”, although Brian and Siobhán intend to stay on Model Farm Road.

For them, it’s been a fabulously convenient location, with a wide choice of primary and secondary schools locally. For Brian, who travels to Manchester regularly for business, it takes “just 58 minutes from the time I leave home to sitting on the aeroplane”, he says.

The couple thought their children might be miffed to hear they were selling up, but it was not the case. “When our son heard we were selling, he said it would be a waste not to, that the house was deserving of a family that could get as much enjoyment out of it as we did,” the couple say.

Norma Healy, of Sherry FitzGerald, is the agent selling Cherry Lodge and she expects considerable interest from families trading up, including re-locators from up the country and from abroad.

“If you look at the quality of the house and the beautifully landscaped site, you can see why families will love it.

“Then you have the Model Farm Road location which is so convenient to Cork University Hospital, UCC and MTU.

“And you have the fike, a real treat for the adults,” Ms Healy says, adding that the guide price is €1.05m.

VERDICT: The buyer line-up is likely to include medics and academics given how convenient Cherry Lodge is to hospitals and third-level colleges. High end home in fashionable neighbourhood.