A home with a slide? This €525k St Luke's house is anything but ordinary

NO 3 Ard Na Gréine is a period Cork city house with a steep back garden that has been more than tamed; it’s been cleverly levelled out into four flat tiers, with easy stepped access threading up and linking them. And there’s an even easier way down from the top: it’s got its very own slide.

“WE’D have loved a toboggan run,” quips Clare, one of the owners of eye-catching No 3 Ard Na Greine, a period Cork city house with a steep back garden that has been more than tamed; it’s cleverly been levelled out into four flat tiers, with easy stepped access threading up and linking them, and an even easier way down: it’s got its very own slide….wheeee.

Probably a bit safer that a hurtling toboggan run, the slide in question here is a short run of wide diameter black drainage pipe between two sections of productive garden with raised beds for fruit, herbs, salads and veg, a sandpit, and a knacky geodesic dome, a hot house environment for seedlings and small children alike, and a sit out spot that gets sunlight late in the evenings.

The garden size, and the job done with it, is a delight and a surprise, rising up steeply behind the Edwardian-era  family home at 3 Ard Na Greine, above the Ballyhooly Road and St Luke’s Cross, currently a contender for Cork’s coolest city ‘burb.

No 3 has been home to Clare and Martin since they bought the 1902-built three-storey period era and features intact home back in 2016, at which stage it had been vacant for seven years, in need of fairly full renovations….which it clearly got.

They’ve worked on it, on and off, over seven years, with very major physical ‘grunt’ work done in the steep back garden, an unusually long one for a city terraced home, at possibly a 20 degree incline, or a 20 degree decline if  approached from the tippy-top, where the garden and timber and polythene-clad geodesic dome meet The Crescent, a residential cul de sac off Gardiner’s Hill to the rear, of similar era terraced homes.

Since buying No 3 in 2016 (the Price Register it selling shows by spring ’17 in a raw state for a recorded €275,000), the couple have been busy inside and outside, clearly not workshy given the digging and levelling and planting and step building in the amenity garden behind, integrating architectural salvage indoors and out, even using sawn down ESB poles for some of the steps, while others are in stone, flagstones and brick.

”When we bought, we were 100 percent staying, we love St Luke’s Cross, and there’s a lovely community here and great neighbours,” says Clare, admitting to mixed feelings at moving away, for a very different lifestyle.

Along the way, a son and a daughter arrived, for whom half the garden features were installed and last year they were joined by a baby brother, who’ll only hear second hand what fun the garden slide was, how popular it was with neighbouring families also, and what he missed out on.

Now a family of five, and with folks working for home in the main, a very different move is on the cards, with the chance to build a modern home from scratch on a few acres near family by the Cork-Kerry border at Rathmore with promise of large pets, and possibly a menagerie (they couple had hens here too, but an urban fox got to plunder them.

If there’s any gradient at all on the site near Rathmore, there’ll be another slide built there, for sure, and maybe a Fort Knox style secure henhouse too.

The novel feature – think the Lotto ad’s upbeat slide joys, only without a jackpot sum spent - could be the clincher in the sale of No 3 now, especially if eyed up by a young couple or family with smallies in tow for the viewings, it will be want, want, want, a slippery slope.

No 3 comes for sale this past week with Sean McCarthy of ERA Downey McCarthy, who not just raves about the home, and its garden, but also the setting. He’s done a professional ‘piece to camera’ introduction to the St Luke’s Cross area, available on various online media sites and YouTube as well as on ERA’s own pages.

Guiding No 3 Ard na Greine at €525,000, selling agent Mr McCarthy is well versed and steeped in the St Luke’s area’s amenities and attractions and charm and even on the precise location of Ard na Greine, as he listed the house next door, No 4 Alainn in the autumn of 2023, guiding €525,000 and it sold for a solid €590,000, having been renovated to a very high standard, in two tranches.

No 4 featured here previously too, and had quite a different feel, more contemporary perhaps, with ground floor rooms opened up, front to back.

In contrast, Clare and Martin stayed closer to the period era feel and layout, and even furniture and décor, opting to maintain separate rooms at ground level, with a front sitting room with bay window, and a rear kitchen with soild timber units and courtyard access via glazed doors framed in solid timber.

They kept every original or authentic feature they could, got old pine floor boards beautifully sanded back and polished by furniture restorer Bruce Perkin, and retained many Georgian and Victorian era wardrobes and other large piece for clothes storage, mixing them with stripped pine and other, diverse, eclectic items from various centuries and decades.

They even went full traditional in the front sitting rooms, choosing a wallpaper redolent of the house’s original Edwardian vintage, comfortably at home with the wide superb fireplace with tile inserts facing an upright piano, and complementing it with antique seating, and keeping a dining table in the deep bay window where all that might be missing is an aspidistra in a glazed porcelain pot or vase!

The kitchen and tops were done with repurposed units, and the kitchen floor is immaculate, with relaid terracotta tiles in familiar red and black tile livery, with the floor under them now insulated, as is that in the front room.

The hall has original encaustic tiles in quite an  intricate pattern following an irregular floor outline, while walls here and upstairs to the return have been finished with a dado and wainscoting; a pair of plaster heads face one another as corbels under an internal arch, just before the stairs, with its warm underfoot runner carpet, humorously given names of two women the couple know. No names here….

A return splits to a main family bathroom, where a vast cast iron bath has been retained in a fully redone bathroom, and there’s a shower in a downstairs guest WC, past an annex serving as a utility room, laundry and storage, also with access to the sheltered courtyard via a new door.

No 3 has been underpinned, rewired and replumbed with several vertical-mounted radiators, and also got reroofed in original Blue Bangor slate (as did most of the terrace here) after damage done by 2017’s Storm Ophelia, one of Ireland’s deadliest hurricanes in over half a century.

That meant enabling the accessible roof/attic to get properly insulated, and some of the sweetest-shaped rooms are up under sloping ceilings on the second floor where there are three bedrooms.

The largest bedroom is on the mid-level, to the back with ascending garden views, and the home’s largest room of all is the first floor’s front-facing ‘piano nobile,’ a drawing room with original fireplace, stained original floor boards and two windows looking down on the Ballyhooly Road, across a locally-curated community garden and up towards houses of all vintages, values and sizes on Alexandra Road and by the Old Youghal Road.

Windows have been replaced, double glazed behind, and with triple glazed sliding sash windows in front and in the bay, but only after Martin and Clare tossed up the option of fitting thin double glazing in the original wooden sashes: noting the silencing effect of triple glazing, Clare say they definitely made the right call.

They kept the original front door, in patriotic St Patrick’s Day green, and like its neighbours in Ard na Greine it has its own private front green behind railings, with a communal, elevated path running in front of all, served by two sets of steps down to the Ballyhooly Road where there’s car parking, with residents’ permits, a feature shared with the 20 or so neighbours in the raised terraces along Ard Na Gréine, Ard Alainn and Knocklaun.

Sunnily-set and west-oriented Ard na Gréine is a two minute walk to St Luke’s Cross, cafes, restaurants, bars and shops, while a ten to 15 minutes downhill amble will get you down to MacCurtain Street, the buzzing Victorian Quarter and or/the train station and bus station, and to the city centre proper.

VERDICT: The long-heralded renaissance of Cork’s St Luke’s area is in full swing: it’s not too late to join the party.