Only thing inflated in colourful €350k Clonakilty home are the balloons

‘I WENT from one inflated business to another,’ jokes Jenny Murphy, the owner of 3 Lady’s Cross, a house of exuberant colour in West Cork’s already most-colourful town, Clonakilty.

Back in 2009/2010, Jenny went from qualifying as an auctioneer to starting her own celebratory event balloon company Red Balloon, and as the Irish property market remained in the doldrums for a few years, in contrast Red Balloon took off, and has soared since, a bit like the house in the winsome movie, Up.

Her home here at Lady’s Cross is a riot of colour and art too, maximalist in style and with unabashed colour everywhere: if you want an antidote to safe and received colours a la Farrow & Ball tones, well you’ll find it at No 3, albeit it has actually now been toned down quite a bit as it comes for sale.

But, you’d have to be told.

Auctioneer Martin Kelleher says Jenny took some advice to cool down the visual spectrum, but still with an advisory note that visitors might need sunglasses for a viewing, while Jenny herself admits she repainted some walls and took down 58 art works which had bedecked most of the walls, and which she misses when thinking of the gaps left from beloved items packed up prior to a house sale.

Jenny has owned No 3 for 17 years, working away on it in bursts and buying or being gifted original art on special occasions.

She has a number of highly reputable artists in her collection, including 3D art from the likes of Brian Monaghan, while she raves about the work of young Dunmanway painter Kate Wilson, who she asked to do a painting of her floral wedding bouquet, and the heavily worked piece is one of the pieces she’d save if the house ever caught fire.

But, now, a year after her wedding, she and her husband, Skibbereen man Richard Thornhill, are selling to get a larger home, to accommodate her Red Balloon business and stock, as well as the imminent arrival of their first child, due in Christmas week.

They decanted her balloon business “from a 1,500 sq ft commercial unit in Ballincollig to a bedroom in Clonakilty”. And, she’s not joking: she has photos of a room packed to the ceiling with her stock in trade, inflated balloons.

So, it was either go around the modern 1,400 sq ft four-bed semi-d with a pin, or find a bigger place to call home and workspace: before the arrival of a baby and its own paraphernalia, hence the arrival of No 3 to a wintry, drab coloured winter market as a vibrant, bright buying prospect.

Jenny would have done much of the interior finishes and painting of walls and ceilings, as well as vinly wrapping of ‘white’ kitchen appliances herself down the years, but the imminent arrival of their baby meant she had to pass the baton (along with paintbrushes) to a professional to calm down some of the wall shades prior to a market outing.

There’s fun as well as functionality for those who keep their eyes open and for the visually curious, well, viewings could take a lot of time, once past the new Wesco front door in ‘safe’ navy and past the two interior hall doors with reclaimed stained glass panels.

One of the bright moves was to put a clear Perspex awning or cover outside the back door, meaning the sliding patio door can be left open in all weathers and the patio, tiled with an array of Moroccan-style, multi-patterned tiles, while the garden is also colourfully planted with flowers galore, even if not much in evidence at this time of year.

A really smart idea was to commission large sheets of corten steel for the back garden boundary divide to slot into the posts normally holding grey concrete panels or flimsy timber.

Jenny got Dublin-based BA Steel Fabricators to cut dandelion flower outlines in various shapes and stages of seed dispersal, and it’s a surprise eye-catcher (pic, bottom right), unique and yet allowing for privacy as well as the tiniest glimpses of life on the other side of the rusty-looking corten steel. Specialist Brian Arkins of BA Steel even did a special fold at a far end piece, a bit like a dog-eared page in a book, to add another dimension.

The devil is in the detail, as the saying goes: Red Ballon’s company ‘car’ is a large black MAN van which naturally enough carries the Red Balloon logo, but more eagle-eyed types will spot the registration plate as 192-C-99. “15- and 16-year-olds don’t get it, but other people do,” laughs Jenny of the catchy earworm song ‘99 Red Balloons’ by German singer Nena, now 40 years old and as relevant today as an anti-war song as then.

Apart from the collected art, spanning thought-provoking to whimsy, from Jill & Gill to a portrait of Mary Robinson on the stairs wall in just the sort of place an earlier Irish era home might have had a picture of the Pope and a papal blessing, there are digital animal works by Sydney artist Graham Atwell (Atty) and works by Eva O’Donovan and wallpapers by the likes of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen and London designer Clarissa Hule’s floral prints, whilst among Jenny’s inspirations are the interiors podcast by TV presenter Sophie Robinson and Kate Watson-Smyth.

Jenny Murphy’s Instagram is @upshecycles, with only a few balloons to be seen, and among the images there is a one of her own book inspitations, the 2022 publication More Is More Décor: A Handbook For Maximalists. Its author is UK writer and designer Siobhan Murphy, a finalist in the BBC Interior Design Masters show, though it’s possible that No 3 Lady’s View’s vendor could give that owner of a UK Art Deco home a run for her money.

Money? Auctioneer Martin Kelleher guides No 3 Lady’s Cross at €350,000, with first viewings lined up for yesterday, so the ripple effect will follow: he expects it to be bid over the asking price.

While departing owners Jenny (and Richard, possibly?) have left their own mark in poetry, peonies and pops of colour, the prosaic description is of a much-cherished four-bed, one en suite, A3-rated home in a strong Clonakilty location, within a walk of the town and yet with unobstructed clear views west, to the windmills on the hills far away at Drinagh that is, yes, practical, yet entirely individual, and a real home.

VERDICT: No need to dress this up any more for Halloween: for conservative minimalists, No 3 Lady’s Cross is a Nightmare off the N71. For anyone else, it’s fun and hey, if gold or purple ceilings aren’t to your particular taste, well, paint is cheap.