Join Blackrock millionaires' row in €1.5m Menloe Gardens beauty

FOR all of the cachet attached to an address like Menloe Gardens on Cork city’s Blackrock Rd, it’s quite notable there’s only been one resale since ‘the crash’ within this chi-chi cul de sac above the €1m mark: well, that solitary figure could be doubled with the listing of a €1.5m Menloe home.

Freshly up for sale, and freshly presented too, is the long-time family home The Limes, well-sized, detached, with a great garden, and a near perfect rear aspect too.

If you have the cash for the cachet, what’s not to like?

Set deep within Menloe Gardens, and facing the majestic, mature chestnut trees that give the estate such visual and green appeal, The Limes is guided at €1.5m by Stuart O’Grady of Sherry FitzGerald, and should make it, and more, given demand in and around suburban Blackrock.

The only previous sale over the €1m mark on the Price Register (since 2010) was that of Kingsley, a 25-year-old, 3,500sq ft five-bed detached on a corner site: it made €1.242m back in 2019.

Back in ‘the boom’, several Menloe Gardens homes came with c €1m price tags, but the precise results from ‘back in the day’ aren’t on the public record.

What is visible, however, is the value now of some of the homes bought over the past few decades, and vastly upgraded and extended. Most were gutted, one was flattened and built back twice the size on a corner site which cost a cool €730,000 in 2011, at the market’s price nadir.

That was then, this is now, and by 2025 the Price Register shows a quite incredible 50 house sales in Blackrock since 2010 having topped €1m, with more to come in the next few months.

A very good, adapted and enlarged 2,700sq ft semi-d, No 17 in the Lindville estate in Ballintemple has very recently gone well over its €950,000 AMV (it was in this ‘House of the Week’ slot a month ago); a very large Janeville home, No 20, has also well exceeded its €1.175m AMV, and sources say the level of market demand in the €1.5m to as much as €3m is unprecedently strong in the greater Blackrock area … good news for sellers, at least.

Likely to date to the mid-1900s, this home, The Limes, is going to suit a wide demographic of the suitably well-heeled, as it’s been regularly invested in and well maintained down the years, has an attic conversion (with permanent stair access) with a bedroom and en suite, has one of its four first-floor bedrooms en suite, and has been extended nicely to the back a decade or more ago, with a trio of Velux windows in upstands in a standing seam pitched membrane roof to draw light deeper in the rear.

That full-width back add-on has French doors opening to a wide paved and stepped patio, both from a kitchen/breakfast room, and from a separate, more formal dining room which links on its inside to a front living room through another set of internal French doors, whilst there’s a central pantry between the kitchen and dining room.

There’s one more sitting room, to the front facing the green and its all-conkering chestnut trees much loved by aesthetes and children alike, while the property also has a detached garage, heated and suitable for upgrades to home office, gym, or even granny flat, with additional storage room also, plus garden sheds.

There’s clearly been much-loved and tended gardens front and back, child friendly, with a south-west aspect and mature screening — so much so in fact that only tantalising glimpses can be gleaned of neighbouring homes left and right with their own sizeable, architectural aplomb extensions done a decade or more ago.

VERDICT: Scoring on location, aspect, B3 BER, condition, and gardens, The Limes is a lovely home in which to put down family roots