Detached home on Cork's Orchard Road is ripe for picking for €550,000
Orchard Road, Cork City €550,000
137 sq m (1,478 sq ft)
4
3
D1
Houses at The Grove, tucked away out of sight off Cork’s Orchard Road, occupy a bit of exalted ground, having been a core part of the once-sizeable Jennings family’s Brookfield estate.
The 19th and 20th-century merchant family’s estate stretched from the suburbs next to the sprawling UCC campus, west along Farranlea Road, and was home to hundreds of acres of farmland, orchards, and fruit fields, notable for succulent sort fruits.
The earliest, mid-19th century days of UCC’s siting was partially on Jennings’ extensive land, and in the late 1990s the college also got to purchase the family’s large, yellow-brick home, Brookfield House, and it’s now the centre of the Medical and Nursing schools, surrounded by 21st-century contemporary wings and mod-cons.
Adjoining land went to developers O’Brien & O’Flynn, who developed the Brookfield Holiday Complex, and some of Cork’s first purpose-built student accommodation, with red-brick blocks slotted amid 150-year-old trees, on ground sloping down to what’s now called Jennings Pool, on the Lee’s south channel upstream of UCC and the Bon Secours.
Apart from the several hundred student beds, OBOF also built about 15 detached houses, also faced in red brick, on a section of the Brookfield grounds they had acquired fronting the ‘very select’ address of Orchard Road.
It’s called The Grove, and was delivered before the Celtic Tiger times really took off, so the houses here are typically ‘only’ 1,500 sq ft, and several fringe the leisure centre section and swimming pool of the popular and well-run neighbouring Brookfield Complex.
Family buyers here included medics, a professional magician, business people, and retired clergy, and there’s probably only every been a handful of resales, certainly less than a half a dozen.
The Price Register shows three since 2010, No 2 in 2014 for €491,000, No 5 in 2012 for €440,500, and €574,000 for No 12 in 2017. Using the ‘orchard rd’ spelling on the Register also shows the sale of the adjoining Orchard Road ‘MacMansion,’ San Paula, making €1.9m in late 2017: plans have since been advanced there at San Paula variously for nine detached homes, and more recently this year for a SHD preliminary inquiry for a 216 student-bed scheme, accessed off Orchard Road.
No 10 The Grove came to market in May of 2018, then guiding €595,000, a price since reduced to €548,500 in summer ‘19, and as yet unsold.
Now, it’s joined by No 3 The Grove, launched this week by Johnny O’Flynn and Sheila O’Flynn of Sherry FitzGerald at €550,000, and that’s for a four-bed (one en suite) detached of 1,478 sq ft.
No 3’s in a cul de sac section of just four, facing a woody triangular green by The Grove’s Orchard Road entrance, and was last sold by Sheila O’Flynn to then-trade-down purchasers.
It’s now an executor sale, and is in very good overall conditions, with scope to do as little, or as much, as its next occupants might wish for: an adjacent home has a very large single-storey extension added at its rear.
With a south/south west front aspect, No 3 has interlinked front to back reception rooms with gas fire insert in a white marble chimneypiece plus has rear garden access; there’s TV room/den to the front, a kitchen/breakfast room and guest WC (no utility, though) and four first floor bedrooms, with master en suite.
Colours and carpets are all neutral shades, and the spotless home could feel quite a bit more modern with a simple change of drapes and furniture.
Sherry Fitz will kick off marketing with virtual viewings, but may be able to move towards actual physical ones from June 8 with the next phase of lockdown restriction due to be lifted, with appropriate attention to safe distancing, hand sanitation etc.
Peach of an address
