Inside the musical Wicklow home where The Fynches grew up — now for sale for €825k

SELLING Wicklow’s vastly upgraded Coningbeg Cottage as a rustic yet accessible lifestyle home, auctioneer Anna Thornton enthuses about the peaceful setting and the sweetest of seasonal birdsong.

Might she mean the sound of The Fynches? They’re an Irish band with deep family roots, and who are finessing their first album to be released in November in this musical home’s adjacent recording studio, and in West Cork where they regularly both gig and record.

The talented band — fronted by singer/actor Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, who was in Oscar-winning Coda, Sing Street and The Vikings — and his brother multi-instrumentalist and singer Oisín grew up at Coningbeg Cottage with two other siblings, after parents, opera singer and teacher Toni Walsh and just retired RTÉ investigative journalist and documentary maker Mick Peelo, made a lifestyle move here near Ashford and just off the M11 25 years ago.

The couple had bought a Land Commission 1930s era cottage, which grew with them as their family also expanded to four young creatives: both generations now have had a gravitational pull to West Cork. Folks Mick and Toni are downsize home- hunting around Clonakilty, swapping the east coast for the south-west, while their offspring have worked, gigged, and lived troubadour musicians lives in and around Clonakilty.

The doubled-in-size Coningbeg Cottage is now a comfortable four-bed 2,080 sq ft detached family home, with (convertable) detached music studio/multi-use additional building, on c a country acre with lofty interiors with feature timbers such as Douglas Fir, conservatory, glasshouse and organic veg gardens with large hen run (clucking fowl to rival blackbirds and Fynches?).

It’s guided at €825,000 by DNG Thornton who started first viewings last week, primarily to Dublin families who also want a lifestyle shift close to the capital, just off the M11 and near Rathnew, Wicklow town, and Ashford.

It’s likely buyers will follow the Walsh-Peelo family’s fledgling footsteps, “swapping suburban Dublin for peaceful and pastoral Wicklow. Waking up on our first morning, to the sound of horses’ hooves, confirmed we had made the right choice … we continue to say it was our best decision ever,” says mum Toni ‘Soprano’ Walsh.

While Mick commuted to Donnybrook’s RTÉ studios, she gave music and singing lessons at this hub of activity, including opera lessons to internationally acclaimed Ava Dodd, while bands like Hudson-Taylor, Gabrielle Aplin, and I have a Tribe “have also passed through to drink at the well, or swim at local beaches”.

Youngest son Ferdia and Fynches frontman was born here, and apart from the band has an acting career that most recently saw him filming the forthcoming Four Letters of Love with Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham-Carter and Gabriel Byrne — whose career also started in Wicklow’s more fictional Glenroe.

Swallows of the feathered kind enhance and enrich the garden “a place of recreation and nourishment, it’s been a passion with organically grown veg plus our hens’ eggs have never disappointed. Now it’s a new chapter for us: needs have changed and new pastures (and, new veg patches) beckon,” Toni chimes.

Balancing that delicate ‘selling while buying’ bridge (house swap, anyone?), the Walsh-Peelo folk are actively scouring property websites as home-hunters in West Cork as their own Coningbeg Cottage is spruced up for sale, so they have fingers on the property market’s pulse and beat at both ends: there could even be a ballad in it?

VERDICT: A well-feathered nest that reared a brood of Fynches. What’s next?