A curveball in Cork: behind the gates of this bold €1.5m family home with a secret garden surprise

 THE architects of Bydon didn’t make it easy for its builders, but they often have difficult designs foisted on them (or entrusted to them) by clients.Bydon's private, stepped facadeCork-based James Leahy Associates, with a 40-year pedigree in and around the city, are known for domestic designs with unusual roof profiles, lots of glass, airy and double-height spaces, curved walls, and louvres, oh! all the sort of things that make house construction even more of a challenge.In the case of Bydon, the builder got just what he had expected, and that’s because he was both client and builder, and it was to be his family home when he rolled up his sleeves back in 2008 to deliver this almost hideaway home in the settled western suburbs.This is all passer-by pedestrians see of Bydon This one-off home, over-basement and with curves in the right places, as well as the location being in very much the right place, was built in the back/end garden of a property called Bydon Lodge, just off Cork City’s Glasheen Road, almost directly facing St Finbarr’s Cemetery, home to past generations of Cork’s citizenry, within minutes of University College Cork (UCC), schools, Cork University Hospital, and the Bon Secours.Kitchen is the red beating heart of BydonThe first Bydon Lodge and the as-modestly titled Bydon  got named thanks to the owners’ combined surnames, Eilish Byron, giving the ‘By’, and Sean O’Donovan, for the ‘Don’ part.The couple had four sons, at the time aged in their later teens and 20s, and this was the dream family home-to-be, both for Eilish, then a nurse, and Sean, who traded at Sean O’Donovan Developments, doing one-off houses and niche schemes in Cork.A West Cork native, from Drimoleague, SeanO’Donovan was well used to projects small and large, including big suburban homes, along with the Cuan Dor Haven development of 12, circa 2,000 sq ft Victorian-style houses in a gated setting above West Cork’s Riviera-like Glandore harbour, among his extensive output.He and Eilish had been 14 years living at Bydon Lodge, on half an acre, just off the city’s Glasheen Road, which they’d renovated and upgraded, when they decided to build bigger, from scratch, on half their grounds:Bright, happy landingsIt was one of Sean’s proudest and most cared-for builds, with huge personal input and pride, says Eilish, as she prepares to trade down a year after Sean’s passing in April 2024.His proud achievement was everything they’d hoped for, a lively family heart for them and their four sons, a place to entertain and be entertained in, utterly accessible to all the city’s services for the boys’ college-going years, yet quietly set, and bespoke designed from the lower ground upwards, to the crowning glory of a neat zinc-clad roof.Open and airyIt fulfilled the brief, and worked as a great intergenerational family home as grandchildren began to arrive. Now, the smallies will have to get used to seeing their grandmother making herself (and them) comfortable in her trade-down home by the Lough, recently bought off-market.Bydon  comes to the open market this late spring with estate agent Johnny O’Flynn, of Sherry FitzGerald, as a five-bed of 3,000 sq ft, full of character and interest, with a particularly solid heft to the build, with concrete floors on all levels, all bespoke and with high-end finishes, and the sort of services now common in new-builds, but quite cutting edge back in 2008.They include zoned underfloor geothermal (electric) heating throughout in the concrete floors, a heat-recovery ventilation system, solar panels for hot water, a pressurised water system, internal vacuum, centralised sound, and CCTV with a well-ordered plant in the home’s accessible basement.Eilish says the short brief she’d given the architects was a large utility room, and a basement for the lads, something they’d appreciated while on a family holiday in Canada, where basements are very much the norm.Basement play roomThis they got, and a lot more, in a home where rooms flow very easily on the main living floor, especially with long internal sight lines from end to end, with dual aspect a common feature in many rooms and with an overall south/west main aspect, flooding the house with light and solar gain.Starting down in the basement, via a solid-oak stairs, is a games room/television room/den/gym/home cinema, whatever use a family wants to make of it, and alongside is a double bedroom and a plant room that keeps the comfortable home thrumming along.The top floor is home to four double bedrooms, two of them with en-suite bathrooms, and a gallery landing with glass balusters overlooking the kitchen island.The main bedroom also has walk-in robes, as well as a dressing area, with a shower in the en suite.Louvre storyIt’s a very good floor plan, with the two en-suite bedrooms at opposite ends of the long house, with double aspect (or triple, if the en-suite doors are open). And the middle bedrooms are interesting spaces, with custom-fitted study desks in each, one oddly-angled, the other curved. Fitting the built-in desks (this was 17 years ago, when computer screens were bigger than more typically-used laptops now, notes Eilish) must have been a bind, but, in this case, the client was the builder....tough.Among the eye-catching individual visual touches are the cedar-clad first-floor bend shapes in a few of the middle-section bedrooms, overhanging the site’s boundary on Schoolboy’s Lane, as well as the novel, punched-metal screens that are interspersed in the block, curved boundary wall, with interspersed planting (similarly punched or perforated metal screens crop up internally, as stair balusters, painted and looking more refined inside).Glimpses from Schoolboy's LaneThe entry point is just left of centre in the straighter, but sectionally-stepped, rendered front facade, with a living room off to the left, part screened from the hall by a feature stone wall, but with glass underneath. Here there’s a double-sided Firebelly wood-burning stove to heat the sectioned-off room, and the hall/stair core, where the upper part of the stairs turns open tread on a steel spine, thus allowing light in from the tall window on the return.That glass partition wrapping the stove allows through views when sitting down in the family room, past a facing guest WC and a cloakroom, opening to a large kitchen/dining room, with island and units in walnut and red gloss done by cabinet maker Bernie O’Mahony, from Carrigaline.The kitchen’s back wall is curved, with the curve then turning the opposite way, like a broken ‘S’ shape, to create a utility room/large pantry, with a wall of shelving for provision storage, near a rear door to a neat passageway, allowing circulation around the back of the house and under the first floor’s bulbous bedroom curve.Then, at the far end of this home is another family/living room, super bright and with comfy sofas, looking out over the enclosed and well-landscaped grounds, done with hard-surface paving, gravel, shrub beds with mature and flowering trees, as well as a snaking water feature pond and channel, with pumped water flowing out over a lip, creating a soothing, steady sound.There’s plenty of grounds, space for al fresco dining or play or a trampoline, but no grass to be seen on this c 0.16-acre site, fully screened, very private, and reached behind bespoke, strong, steel electric gates, with even a touch of architectural elan to them.The road outside, Schoolboy’s Lane, is a sort of vehicular cul-de-sac laneway/greenway, serving only a very few homes off the Glasheen Road by the traffic lights near St Finbarr’s cemetery, while the lane then turns greenway once past the private house next door to Bydon, opened after an upgrade in 2021 by Cork City Council to give a pedestrian/cyclist link from Glasheen Road to Magazine Road and, by extension, to College Road, UCC, the Bons, and Dennehy’s Cross.Family room with dual aspect stoveApart from the main, distinguished-looking, 3,600 sq ft, over-basement and highly functional home, Bydon’s mix include a detached, timber-clad chalet-style garden room and store, suitable as a home office, as it has a power supply and internet connection, handy, really, to be connected to the wider world as, once within its curtilage, you have little idea of just where you are, or how conveniently set.The last time the Irish Examiner glimpsed Bydon  was when the family’s older home, Bydon Lodge (that name has since changed, as it was personal to this family) came for sale back in 2008, as an upgraded, 2,500 sq ft dormer home, carrying a €820,000 AMV and the ’Lodge’ was visible over the back boundary.Bydon was built in the grounds  of this home, Bydon Lodge, pictured here in 2008Sitting now in Bydon’s warm living area, looking out on very mature screening, the Irish Examiner asked owner Eilish if this was her ‘red dot’ favourite spot and what she’d liked most about the family’s adventurous ‘new’ house?“Hearing the sound of them cutting all of the grass next door,” she quipped. VERDICT: A total surprise, and a very pleasant one for those with means to buy at this c €1.5m upper price echelon. Likely to be a medic purchaser, possibly a trader-up or a returnee to Cork hospitals from wider afield and with suitably high standards, with little to match this as a contemporary home, within a walk of essential amenities, services, and schools.The only thing the next occupants won’t get is to keep the ‘Bydon’ name. It’s going to the Lough, and a next life chapter.

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