€1.15m Cork City home where all the world was a stage

THE JOYS of a sunny setting overlooking Cork city from lofty Montenotte are back on a high as elevated as the address — just witness the €650 per night that visitors from near and far are prepared to pay to nest and to sleep in the trees at the Montenotte Hotel’s extraordinary architect-designed and award-winning Woodland Suites.

Yet, the pleasures of the south-aspected hillside cresting upwards, north and east of the city centre and St Luke’s Cross, have been known to canny locals, wealthy merchants, medics, and discerning cultural figures for nigh-on centuries.

Some of the properties on this commanding city height date to the 1720s: This beauty, Eglantine, is just a tad newer, some 200 years old and has been home to the well-known Wilson family for more than half a century.

It was bought by the late ophthalmic surgeon Dr Denis Wilson and his physicist wife Mary when they moved up to the city from Westbourne Place in Cobh, after Dr Wilson became a highly-respected consultant at the Ear Nose and Throat, returning to Cork from England.

The widely-known and noted Denis Wilson later wrote ‘De Iron Trote’, the colloquially-titled history of the Cork Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital 1868-1988, after his retirement.

The Wilsons took on the quietly splendid Eglantine, rearing four children here with glorious freedoms: Sons John, Mark and Peter, and daughter Fiona, aka Fiona Shaw, this latter Wilson family member better known far and wide as the leading classical actor, star of stage, TV and big screens, the Olivier, Emmy and BAFTA multiple award-winner …aka mega-mean, Muggle and wizard-denying Aunt Petunia Dursley in five Harry Potter movies.

Oh, and detailing her career could fill out the rest of these pages, and this is about her shared family childhood and young adulthood home: Dramas aside.

The Wilsons’ all-embracing Georgian era Eglantine was a Cork cultural hub, with Denis and Mary sharing a lifelong interest in the arts, music and theatre, with their period Montenotte city home a suitably dressed venue for poetry readings, operatic evenings, meals and musical recitals.

The hub-bub worked its way into a second generation, clearly, as the young Fiona Wilson (Shaw) put on dramatic shows at home from a very early age, with her brothers possibly in walk-on roles or as extras, whilst music also permeated into the current generation.

Even today one of the formal reception rooms at Eglantine is listed as the Piano Room, home to a baby grand piano as well as to eldest sibling John’s double bass; he plays in jazz combos in France where he and his brother Mark both now live, while youngest son, Peter, died in 1985 aged 18 in a car accident after a rugby match.

Denis Wilson died in 2011, while Mary continued to live here up until last year, and now the family are selling their much-loved and lauded Eglantine on her behalf, as the family storehouse empties of pictures on walls, papers and books get winnowed, as collections of fine prints of Cork harbour look for new homes, music and memories going more silent — the latter having been shared with hundreds of visitors to the family’s home down the decades of Wilson ownership and occupation.

Detached, upright and tall, the three-bay home stands proud, yet largely out of sight, on extensive grounds of c 0.7 of an acre, a few doors uphill on the Middle Glanmire Road from the extensive acreage of the Montenotte Hotel vastly reinvigorated from its days as Cork’s Country Club, and with the hotel’s viewing terraces and new, trend-setting ‘treehouse’ woodland suites to dine for.

It’s a view over Cork and an experience of it, that hotel guests rave about, and locals bring visitors up to, to savour, to map out Cork’s Leeside evolution, picking out points of interest, land-banks having moved from swamp reclamation to industry, sports, walks and, coming next, tall apartment blocks and new residential neighbourhoods in the offing.

At an eyrie like Eglantine, it’s been daily fare for centuries.

It’s quite the property arrival too, given it’s a sturdy period home of 200 years existence, on extensive very private grounds, set beneath the narrowest stretch of Montenotte’s Middle Glanmire Road, out of public sight behind impressive cast iron gates and robust ornamental fluted pillars, to off-street private parking area with the old sandstone walls of a former coach-house and stables still standing, keeping guard, ready for new uses, surely?

The two-storey, over-basement and square-set house with central roof valley is itself reached below these buildings — with-potential, down a winding, gently stepped path with chicane bends, scything past mature trees, shrubs, mature yew and myrtles and more.

The grounds then continue their way well past the house, past a working ornamental fountain central in the main lawn, before continuing down in tiers and slopes, past an old orchard, to end in woodland by the high sandstone bluff above the Lower Glanmire Road by Water Street: pure Cork.

It’s an oasis of sorts, recently significantly cut back from overgrowth with the true scale of the grounds it stand on now fully apparent once more.

Families looking at a life up here can make plans for decades to come, should they so wish.

APART from the house, which is wonderful, there’s scope galore in the gardens for almost any sort of activity, natural adventure centre, fruit and vegetable gardens and there’s still the bare bones of a glasshouse put in by the late Denis Wilson for tomatoes, and other tender foods: you could feed the entire of St Luke’s with produce from here, should you so wish.

The southern end of the grounds are marked by a very old wall, with archway, and in earlier years there was a path down to the Lower Glanmire Road from several of the grand houses and villas up on this height: The traffic went both ways, John Wilson recalls, as apple slogging from their orchard was quite a thing in his past memories.

That was in the past. In the future, might new long-term occupants rob ideas from the adjacent hotel’s Woodland suites and build themselves a hideaway viewing pod along similar lines? Might the hotel like to acquire more ground from here and add further suites?

Up at the other end, the stable and coach-house could be a cool conversion project to a mews-type uses, subject to planning, without impinging much at all on the main house, and those coming to view will note the relatively restricted gate access for cars. The simple expedient of a pair of convex mirrors will add much reassurance for those looking to get out onto the road, although the Wilsons never thought them necessary.

Let’s not forget Eglantine itself, with some faded elegance, yet very well preserved, with fairly minimal interventions over the past 50 years, such as a simple, yellow Murray-style kitchen, now almost a timepiece in itself, and kitchen aside all of this period home’s original finery and features are all here.

There’s a good roof, thankfully, and only some windows were replaced with inappropriate pvc double glazing, ‘Georgian-style’ a few decades back. They are the main ones on the southern façade, and a fastidious new owner here will find it an easier job now to replace with smart, energy efficient timber sliding sash windows than would have been the case a few decades ago.

Eglantine’s not a protected structure, surprisingly enough, and gets a E2 BER, not unexpectedly, has gas central heating, and appears dry and protected, but ready for added polish, across all three floors. It’s got a superb suite of basement rooms, six or more, for storage, games, gym, media room, home office, etc, or as a self-contained apartment with enough work done, and has a door to the main garden off the central hallway, as well as a proper wine cellar.

At the back another door open to a service lane, with WC, numerous stores for timber, coal etc, and would have been top-loaded from higher up on the grounds ‘back in the day.’ The only good thing about getting heavy loads like sacks of cod would have been the fact the way to the house and these stores from the road and gates is all downhill!

Main entry is via an original porch with stained glass features, leading to an off-centre hall with graceful, curving stairs to the left, and beyond, essentially, are three reception rooms and a modest (for the size of the house, at least) kitchen.

Doors, floors, fireplaces and decorative plaster such as roses, cornices, dado etc are all as they ever were, intact and preserved, and two of them are suitably ‘superior’, the Piano Room, and the oblong sitting room or dining room, with elaborate pitch pine panelling, including into a deep bay window: it’s a stunning room for evening entertainment.

The two best reception rooms are each double aspect, as are all three first floor bedrooms; two have exceptional views, not surprisingly, and the main bathroom is another beguiling timepiece….it wouldn’t look out of place in a Hogwarts scene.

There’s a fourth bedroom in what was probably an early to mid 20th annex, with fireplace. This was the young Fiona Wilson’s bedroom, and needed the fire as it was icy cold, brother John concedes.

Time moves on, and a new chapter beckons: Eglantine comes to market this March with Laura Pratt of Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty who says “a rare opportunity of a substantial period property on extensive mature gardens of 0.7 acres has arisen.” 

Lisney’s price guide is €1.15m, the sort of price mark another period home, Montenotte House, has recently been sold for, and it will attract the same sort of viewing interest as that other period gem rightly did.

Estate agent  Ms Pratt says there’s a mix of living and bedroom accommodation in “a truly remarkable historical home”, with extensive ground and “an unbeatable location just 1.7 kms from Cork city”... all of which makes Eglantine extraordinary.

VERDICT: Eglantine doesn’t need a blue heritage plaque on the pillars to say Fiona Shaw, one of Ireland’s finest actors lived here and cut her dramatic chops at this Montenotte eyrie.

It speaks for itself, rather eloquently too, let it be said.