Daydream believer got the home she always wanted as a child

WHEN Lawn House came up for sale in 2018, it tapped into Marion’s childhood fantasy of always wanting to see inside the door of this mysterious Drimoleague home.

“It was a very special house to me. I had passed it every day as a child, from the age of 10.

“I was never in it, but I could see it from the road. I loved this house. To me, it was very mysterious. You’d never see anyone coming in or out.” So says Marion, the current owner, who bought it with her husband Andrew seven years ago.

A Drimoleague native, she’d spent much of her adult life in the UK and was selling a house in Suffolk when Lawn House, West End, came up for sale.

“We came here during the summer for a viewing with my mother, who lived down the road. She said ‘Oh for God’s sake, surely you’re not going to buy this place?”, Marion recalls.

“I said ‘I don’t think so’, but the truth is I knew I was going to buy it as soon as I walked in the door.” It was “a sad pile” at the time, the couple says. Windows were held together with angle brackets; carpets squelched underfoot; the roof was ready to cave in. Nonetheless they put in a bid in September 2018 and it was accepted.

“We didn’t realise how much work we were taking on. We thought we’d get away with not replacing the roof, but when the builders started looking at the joists and rafters, things changed a bit,” sighs Andrew.

In the end, it was a “huge project”. The couple has a photographic archive of the restoration work they undertook, and there are pictures of a digger in the hallway and bits of debris everywhere. All the floors had to come up, windows were taken out, specialists had to come from Killarney to address the dampness.

“We were lucky that at the very least there was no dry rot,” Andrew says.

In January 2019, the scaffolding went up around the house. The following month the builders moved in. Once the downstairs floors were dug up, underfloor heating was installed, which went a long way towards resolving any damp. New concrete floors were poured and each of 24 windows was replaced.

“We were staying down the road with my mother and we didn’t know when the new windows were arriving, but we suspected something was happening when we passed one day in April 2019 and there were vans and people all over the place,” Marion says.

With the building energy rating at Lawn House improving in leaps and bounds, the next step was to insulate the entire house internally. The result of all the energy upgrades will knock your socks off — it’s now rated a B1 — warm enough not to put the socks back on.

The couple is very pleased with this level of energy efficiency given the house dates to c1810.

“We think it was built as a single storey home during the Georgian period and that a second storey was added about 100 years later. We think it may have been built for clergy and we know that a doctor rented it for 15 years,” Marion says. Other than that, the history of the house is flimsy, but what they can say with certainty is that it was “a cold, damp, unloved house when we bought it”.

“The fact is, if it hadn’t been remodeled, it could have collapsed by now, because the roof was already bowing when we bought it,” Andrew says.

The couple, who relied on referrals from people living locally to get tradesmen and builders for the project, managed to move in by October 2019 and spent a year doing internal renovations, including spray-painting the entire house white.

They moved the kitchen out of a side room down the hallway into one of the two front reception rooms that look down over the long front driveway. 

It’s a striking blend of period features and minimalist modern kitchen units under a towering ceiling with centre rose and coving. 

The inbuilt sparkle of a large, quartz-topped island glints in the bright natural light that floods through the double-aspect windows.

 A Qettle tap provides instant hot water and a six-ring Rangemaster is ideal for entertaining.

The original spectacular fanlight design remains in place at Lawn House, over an eye-catching, deep blue front door, but the original hallway tiles are long gone.

“It was such a dark house that I wanted something light,” Marion says. The tiles she put down bring a crisp brightness to the space. Floors in the two front reception rooms are engineered oak. Both are double aspect, high-ceiling rooms, with garden views everywhere you look.

Further down the hallway, the former kitchen is now a big, bright utility/pantry.

 Stored away behind cupboard doors are the nuts and bolts of the sophisticated air to water heating system – where a drying rack does the job of airing clothes.

Past the graceful staircase, through stunning fanlit double doors, is the “garden room” added in the 70s or 80s, with access to a lengthy timber deck that Andrew built.

 It faces south.

 There’s a high grade downstairs shower-room too, and across the hallway, a large family room.

Overhead, at the top of the staircase, a large landing has scope for seating. 

Each of the four bedrooms off the landing is a double, each has an en suite.

 Down a few steps, on a half landing, is a home office/study and a walk-in wardrobe. The couple points out that these two rooms could be converted to another bedroom en suite, particularly if new owners were interested in running an Airbnb, which the house and 5.3 acres of grounds (meadow, woodlands and lawn) could certainly accommodate.

They carried out a good deal of work in the grounds too, removing trees that had self-seeded over the years. “There were so many trees when we bought it, that you could no longer see the house from the road,” Marion says.

They removed a few that would have posed danger in the event of a storm and a few that were negatively affecting drainage. There’s still a good deal of woodland left, running around the site periphery and dotted about the beautiful lawns. The River Ruagagh runs through the property close to the northern boundary, and it’s all quite dreamy and idyllic. 

You’d never guess Main St, Drimoleague was at the bottom of the drive. Having invested vast sums of money to restore and renovate the house that sparked the imagination of 10-year-old Marion, the couple is now selling up, with plans to downsize. Catherine McAuliffe of Savills is handling the sale and she says it’s a unique opportunity “to acquire a beautifully restored period country home where the grounds are entirely private”.

She’s already had an enquiry from the US and expects to hear more from overseas, including from Germany and from ex-pats, probably originally from the West Cork area.

“Or there could be local interest, from someone like Marion,” the agent says.

Ms McAuliffe says she expects it to be a fulltime residence.

“It’s that kind of house, it needs people living in it,” she says. The guide price for the 315 sq m property is €975,000.

Drimoleague village is located between Bantry, Skibbereen, and Dunmanway and is a 70 minute drive from Cork city.

VERDICT: The next owners will reap the benefits of a skillfully restored, warm, elegant home in a tremendous setting. Shows what can be achieved when a childhood fantasy is realised.