Who'll push the boat out for €1.3m Glengarriff waterside  bungalow?

WILL someone push the boat out at West Cork’s Brylands? It’s got to be tempting.

Just listed for sale for vendors with a hospitality background and who’ve had this waterside bungalow for about 30 years, Brylands is sort of a standard-issue bungalow, in a stand-out setting, nestled among rocky outcrops: it’s even within reasonable swimming distance of Garinish Island, in the Glengarriff crook of Bantry Bay.

Near a roadside popular swimming spot and pier, Ellen’s Rock, this waterside home called Brylands is on a private 4.5 acres, mostly woodland, with a flat bed of lawn and stone terrace between the house and the beckoning briny.

It’s got that elusive and exclusive thing, lots of shoreline frontage, and even has a running mooring to enable boat owners to keep a craft accessible on the water all summer long.

 Boat owning seems to be an obvious passion of select property owners dotted around one of the most scenic stretches of Munster coastline, with Glengarriff and Garinish Island known internationally as beauty spots.

One of the owners of this modest-sized home was local and branched out into the hotel business up the country and this was their local bolthole.

More recently, it’s been used primarily for holiday rentals and via platforms like Airbnb: a promotional video with zooming drone footage highlighting its charms and coastline niche facing Garinish Island has racked up more than 20k views on YouTube to date.

Set at the start of the road out to Castletownbere from Glengarriff, Brylands is now for sale, priced at €1.3m by agent Olivia Hanafin of Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill’s Bantry offices (Bantry’s a c 15-minute spin away) with a premium clearly put on its water frontage and views over the harbour as well as of boats and the ferries to the  OPW-managed island and its semi-tropical gardens.

The house’s main living area with feature stone chimney breast has the best of the views, with a virtual wall of glass and sliding glazed doors to the stone-flagged terrace, while other front-facing windows are more standard, wide bungalow style.

It has three bedrooms, one of them is en suite, plus kitchen, all in good order and nicely presented, ready to move into if buyers so wish but there’s also a possibility that whoever lives here next will have grander plans for a house in such a rare location — there are a few stand-out homes of high architectural worth dotted about the shoreline.

The harbour has seen €1m+ sales with some regularity in the past decade. Across the way, a large modern build called Martello House on 34 acres has sold for €1.7m (it had a €1.95m AMV); a number of houses in Dromgarriff Woods show on the price register at €1.4m/€1.5m, acquired as a package by entrepreneur Bryan Meehan who also bought the Park Hotel in Kenmare two years ago.

Adjacent there, the late actor Maureen O’Hara’s beloved Lugdine Park by Dromgarriff’s old oak woods also shows on the Price Register at €2.5m, but when its additional land is factor into the sale it sold for closer to €2.8m. Also sold in the same price bracket was the part-restored Glengarriff Castle, making €2.7m on 87 harbourside acres in 2020.

VERDICT: Lovely just as it is — but will someone aim to make even more of Brylands?