If Paradise was half as nice: Head turner on Cork's Blackrock Road for €1.1m

JESMOND, a bit of a head turner, could have ended up as a standard dormer, but didn’t, because its owners are possessed of a prodigious amount of creative flair.

It had already shrugged off convention by angling itself sideways, not too bothered about facing directly onto the Blackrock Road.

One of the flourishes that lifts it into the realm of interesting is the very large, double height, glass box porch that takes you through to the front door. Next is the extra wide hallway, from where there’s a straight-through view to a sublime garden beyond the glazed back kitchen wall. It’s nature in a frame and you could sit there and admire it all day.

Everything about Jesmond says the people who live there knew instinctively what to do to create an exceptional home.

They came well-armed, as one of them is an artist, Miriam Logan, with the vision to see things differently. She could tell that a curved wall in the kitchen would look so much softer than the standard straight line.

 She understood that it would be madness to hack out the Arts-and-Crafts-style original windows, with their tiny leaded squares on the upper panes. 

Her husband Michael Logan, formerly of the IDA, also erstwhile farmer and wine importer, understood this too. And so when they gutted the house and raised the roof, they hung on to all the good bits, such as the original, tall, stripped-pine internal doors. They couldn’t hold onto the original old and battered veranda, but they did cling on to the idea of it, and when the bulk of the building work was done, that idea took shape, and a more robust, terracotta-tiled full-house-width veranda was laid, a very effective extension of the living space, and, because a veranda is roofed, usable all year ‘round.

“It was fantastic during covid,” Michael says, “because we could have people over and seat them outside and meet all the pandemic requirements”.

On the morning the Irish Examiner calls to the Blackrock Road home, the couple are sitting in the folded back double doors of their large open-plan kitchen/dining/living room, at a mini breakfast table, straddling the house and veranda. They’re well sheltered from the rain that has just drenched that fantastically vibrant back garden.

“We can sit out here summer and winter,” they say.

The garden is competing with art-bedecked indoor walls, some of it Miriam’s work, all of it visually stimulating, as you might expect in an artistic household.

In fact, Miriam, whose art combines painting and poetry ( On Indigo Bridge is her recent publication), has exhibited extensively, despite being a relative latecomer to art. Her original day job was in the State’s family mediation service in Dublin, but when they moved to Cork, she returned to college and completed an MA in Comparative Aesthetics and the Arts at UCC. She continues to draw on her conflict resolution background in her artwork, where she says “creativity is of central concern”.

Creativity is not exclusive to Miriam at Jesmond. The garden is Michael’s handiwork and it’s as vivid and textured as anything you will see in a gallery. A cherry blossom tree at the bottom of the exceptionally long garden (270 ft all told, from front to rear wall) may be the biggest cherry blossom tree you will ever see.

A nearby oak was self-sown, Michael reckons. He’s taken to rewilding parts of the garden in recent years and that’s produced some beauties too, like lilies and ferns and foxgloves, from seeds he reckons were dropped by birds.

 Apart from mowing a path through some of the high grass, he’s left the bottom of the garden largely to its own devices. A standout feature here is his own work of art, a hand-built tower made of cobble stones, that once formed the floor of a coach house and stables of a farm they lived in in Co Louth, and which he kept in storage, before transporting them years later to Cork.

 The tower is topped off by a quern stone, used for grinding corn, and passed down through the family.

It’s not the only bit of history at Jesmond. The land was once part of the estate of Ballintemple House — with lots of market gardens in the area — and among the little treasures that date back to that time are the remnants of a glass house, with its footings now used to support raised vegetable beds. Michael believes there may have been a tennis court also at one point.

Jesmond itself dates to 1913 and historical documents reveal some intriguing details. It appears a three-way agreement was reached between Cork Mutual Benefit Terminable Building Society and a gentleman of the name Paul Allen Dowman, with an address at Iona, Blackrock, and a lady named Florence Edith Gregory of Ballintemple House. Under the terms, Dowman was given 18 months to “expend the sum of three hundred pounds” on building Jesmond, with the instruction that it was to be “a good and substantial dwelling house”. Subsequent paperwork certifies that the conditions were met and the appropriate amount expended.

When the Logans bought Jesmond 21 years ago, it was a 1,200sq ft three-bed bungalow. They left it untouched for a couple of years, so they’d a good sense of what they wanted when renovations started in 2006. They left the ground-floor footprint as it was and went up overhead instead.

“All that remains of the original bungalow is three external walls,” Michael says.

Miriam says the house has the advantage of ”older features, with none of the disadvantages of older homes, such as dampness”. (A C1 energy rating was awarded in 2016 and there’s a good chance it’s even better now as the enclosed stove in the family room was installed in the interim.) 

One of those old features is a stunning period fireplace set against redbrick in the lounge area of the open plan space. There’s a second period fireplace in the dining space.

They drew on advice from architect Donal Anderson when deciding what the house would look like and JDM Construction took care of the build, which took six months. At the end of it, the bungalow emerged a 2,000sq ft two-storey dormer, with peaked dormer windows in a red-tiled roof.

Looking up the garden towards the house from the rear, Jesmond’s triangular gable end with that full-width veranda gives it a distinctly Alpine flavour, with an Alpine-meadow feel in the re-wilded parts of the garden.

 Adding to that sense is a pretty little chalet, a free-standing, octagonal garden room, with cosy electric fireplace and two-piece bathroom suite that has functioned variously as a home office and an art studio and a den for young guests, thrilled with indoor/outdoor sleepovers.

Garden lights that Michael bought for one of Miriam’s birthdays create a cosy glow in the garden at night, along with the light from the chalet. Guests always remark on how pretty it looks, Miriam says.

There’s a warm glow too when the recently fitted wood-burning stove in the cosy, west-facing family room is lighting in the winter. 

It’s a gorgeous room with deep set original bay window and original wooden floor.

Next door is a room currently in use as a workspace but which could also be a fourth bedroom, depending on a new owner’s needs.

A guest WC also on the ground floor has stunning aquamarine tiling, an unusual circular sink that might remind you of the quern stone and a high-up miniature window that does the job of an extractor fan but has much higher aesthetic value.

Across the hallway, there’s ample space under the stairs to accommodate a couple of bookcases and a double height window on the return of the stairs ensures the hallway and staircase is flooded with natural light.

The main bedroom, a fine size, overlooks that glorious back garden, viewed through big Rationel-style black-painted windows. 

A walk-in wardrobe is cleverly concealed behind slide robes. The ensuite has both bath and standalone shower cubicle and a vibrant colour palette.

Two more upstairs bedrooms share a Jack and Jill bathroom and the bigger of the two has a big box bay window over the porch, with views towards Silversprings in one direction and of some of Blackrock Road’s lovely period homes in the other.

Michael and Miriam’s decision to sell is linked to a desire to spend more time closer to family and also to downsize.

They’re ready this time, having considered it for a number of years, unlike the last time they put Jesmond up for sale in 2016. Back then, they knew they weren’t ready. This time they are.

Selling Jesmond is Patricia Stokes of Stokes Auctioneers and Valuers, and the guide price, as it was in 2016, is €1.1m. She describes it as “an oasis of peace and tranquility surrounded by greenery”.

The greenery starts with a bamboo screen inside the high front wall, where a gravel drive can accommodate three or four cars. A double garage is barely visible behind a feature tree in the driveway.

The grounds around the house extend to 0.36 acres, and Ms Stokes says Miriam and Michael “know exactly how to get best use and enjoyment from these gardens and have strategically created discreet seating areas to maximise this”.

She believes this detached four-bed, where old-world features combine with modern living requirements, is a unique home in a neighbourhood with more than its fair share of fetching properties.

Some of those properties have sectioned off portions of the large sites they stand on to accommodate another home (or two) and the size of the Jesmond site makes it a possibility here too. Access to the back would need to be worked out first though, as the site is long, but slender.

VERDICT: You’d almost buy this house for the garden/veranda combo alone. The bonus is that the house is terrific too, and the location speaks for itself.