Champagne budget needed for 'wonderfully bonkers' Kinsale bar with no beer

ONE of Ireland’s best located, most charming, old fashioned and utterly idiosyncratic bars — once described by Lonely Planet as “wonderfully bonkers” — is up for sale as a “once in a lifetime chance to buy.”

Almost the pub with no beer, the Harbour Bar on Scilly in Kinsale has 150 years or more licensed trade tradition as a residential pub, but never had so much as a beer tap or draught beers to offer its patrons.

It was beer bottles, all the way across generations of owners, even before craft IPA beers became achingly cool and on trend.

What’s next, the popping of champagne corks?

Barely touched by the hand of time over many decades, the Harbour Bar has been an under the radar find for denizens for cosy bars and chatty barkeeps. It is quite literally a timepiece from top to bottom, front to back, inside and outside, with a location, setting, and views that could be described as priceless — except they have a price, a steep one. 

How about €1.5m for the fusty bar and overhead lookout accommodation, and then a separate €900,000 for a site used for parking cars, of just 0.1 of an acre or c 4,000 sq ft, in all?

Trying ringing in those sort of sums on the cash register in Scilly’s Harbour Bar.

  Not only is it a world removed from cashless tap and pay, the till is mechanically operated, has clunky keys to press, and the numbers on it refer to old money, pre-euro, back to Irish pounds, shillings, and pence.

We are talking serious time warp here, make no mistake: the only things bang up to date are the price guides for the properties, as-is, the guts of €2.5m for what’s currently a bar, and a parking spot.

The value, clearly, is in what they will become.

It’s nearly too easy to throw about cheap jibes about “Scilly Money,” but hey, it’s apt and has a till ring to it too.

Many of Kinsale’s dearest house sales have been in this very Scilly spot, with the Harbour Bar almost in the centre of a Bermuda Triangle of very considerable wealth and property values.

Looming up behind the Harbour Bar is a white glass box home called Seaspray, built only a few years ago and which sold in late 2023/early 2024 to US billionaire James Berwind. He has since further upgraded, and added two yellow stripes to the facade.

It’s in the same shade as is on his €80m superyacht Scout, which he uses to visit Kinsale, where he has so far spent over €16m on a trio of homes, with more yet to come plus a residential farm in Ballinspittle also recently acquired.

To the town side of the Harbour Bar on Scilly’s Lower Road is Raffeen House, a Georgian home on the waterfront with a floating pontoon/jetty, bought for €4.75m by another super wealthy American, former financier Thomas Quick, also an owner of a substantial boat, who has similarly lashed significant funds on Raffeen since his 2022 purchase of the gem-set home.

Go up the Scilly hill a tad, past the Man Friday restaurant and you’ll come to Ocean Breeze, a rebuilt home opposite the Spaniard bar, with stunning views, bought over a year ago by Nike heir Travis Knight for a reported €4.5m, but not visible on the Price Register.

Local sources say the new owners are currently doing an internal gut job on their multi-million euro purchase. As you do.

An Irish buyer — Cork born but based in the Caribbean for many years — paid €2.55m for architect-designed Corafinne in Scilly, outdone really only in terms of local buying power by the Corkman who spent €10m combined for a house and some farmland on the crown of Kinsale’s Compass Hill, across the harbour from Scilly.

The targeting of elite, super wealthy home hunters is expected to continue in the next year when up to a half a dozen large new villas being built by Compass Hill on the old Mercy Convent grounds get put for sale: think €4m each or more.

So, yes, Kinsale is different, and that’s why the sale of the Harbour Bar just might make waves around Kinsale harbour too … certainly multiples of what it might be worth in pure bricks and mortar terms in any lesser location.

It is just listed with estate agent Brendan Bowe on behalf of the wider family of the late owner, Tim Platt, whose parents Jebb and Stanley Platt bought it back almost 50 years ago, moving to the Cork coast from their previous venue the Delgany Inn in rural and wooded Wicklow.

The Platt family bought the Harbour Bar from previous owner, Doris Hutchinson, at auction in May 1977, going past their own self-imposed upper limit of £35,000 for a quirky pub, which even then then was deemed remarkable.

Family members suspect “the excitement of the bidding, and possibly a few whiskeys, sent the price to £41,750, which set the record as one of the most expensive per square feet for a pub without draught beer at the time.”

It’s likely it always had had a niche appeal, down the decades and even before the Platts’ stewardship over two generations.

There’s a battered old guest book still by the cash register with entries going back to the 1960s and Doris Hutchinson’s time behind the counter... with her pet poodles in permanent residence.

Getting the time to trawl through the guest book could pay rich dividends, but as is often the case, it’s the names that didn’t get entered that could be the most interesting.

“If the walls could talk?” is the sort of thought prompted by even a cursory step over the bar’s threshold.

But, even if the walls stay schtum, it’s likely that the last owner, Tim Platt, could well have spilled manys the beans.

The place is so tiny the chances of anyone having a private conversation or, dare to say it, a tryst, and not have Tim aware of it, or chime in on it, was rare, it’s said.

Tim Platt passed away in July of 2024, with many heartfelt tributes paid to him from regulars, recalling his erudition, sense of fun, gentle demeanour, and reciprocal loyalty to his Jack Russell, Poppy.

It drew many descriptions of the uniqueness of his Harbour Bar and discussions late into the evenings around the tiny curved counter, unfettered by beer taps, or by the fireplace and stove, on seats that had seen better days, and not an upholsterer in a half a century or more.

Many compared sitting in the Harbour Bar to being in a sitting room rather than a pub: among them was the travel guide the Lonely Planet whose review said

“Romping home in Kinsale’s ‘most unusual bar’ stakes, this is a little gem of a place. It’s so much like being in someone’s

front room that you forget you are in a bar at all.

“Landlord Tim presides over the battered old sofas and small brick bar, shares stories and keeps the fire stoked in the hearth. Wonderfully bonkers.”

Regular visitors and even those just passing through highly rated his Irish coffees and Bloody Marys, while rows of tiny mixer bottles filled shelves under spirit dispensers and a tall fridge kept tabs and temperatures down on beer bottles and cans.

WHAT now? It’s still got a bar licence, continuing a public house tradition stretching back to the mid to late 1800s, but unless some complete eccentric buys it and runs it as a hobby, this is now going to the private home stakes, perhaps with a home bar keeping some original features as a memento of its rich and varied past uses.

As a property, it’s tightly sandwiched between an upgraded house on the left, with large glazed sections (it was once a sailing clubhouse, sold back in 2018 as The Boathouse for €825,000) and a large house on the right, built in place of a former and once substantial bar, the now deflated Spinnaker.

It’s got a large and ugly Leylandii tree close to its face whose removal could be a blessing, and would certainly open up even better views, but in fairness, it’s not as if the building is caught for points (or, pints) of maritime interest.

The Harbour Bar has a small, walled garden section separating its front door from Scilly’s Lower Road, with a very old pier/slipway on the other side of the road, still in use for launching small craft and for storing kayaks.

In earlier days, this would have been thronged with fishermen, catch-landing and net-mending given the profile of this Scilly and Pallace Wharf section by the Scilly dam inlet.

It’s likely a few bars of the 1968 National Song Contest entry Mending my Nets in Kinsale, by Jack Brierley and George Crosbie, got warbled across the Harbour Bar’s threshold too in Doris Hutchinson’s time here?

The view over the pier will never change, nothing will be built on it, reckons auctioneer Bredan Bowe from the upper deck of this one-off property offer, whilst saluting a couple getting their wedding photograph taken just in front, by the water’s edge, with the panoply of Kinsale harbour, its marinas and bristling yacht masts, like hedgehog or porcupine spines laid out atop of decks, in front to admire.

The Harbour Bar is three storeys tall, topped with a railed balcony and sliding patio doors on the uppermost level for the very best views of town, forts and water, with Velux windows also set left and right, in the mansard roof, while under the mid level has three Georgian style windows to the front, and at ground the entry is mid-point, with a bay window by the bar on the right all but shrouded by the Leylandii.

It goes back quite deeply, with a storeroom and old WCs behind, out past the stairs, up against a stone wall buttress, with external rear access and raised outdoor section, running behind the house that has now replaced the Spinnaker bar.

A former guesthouse, The Moorings, just further beyond, also “went private,” bought and reconfigured as a home back in the early 2000s.

Right now, the Harbour Bar and its car parking space just one house away from it connect up, and it’s possible one buyer might emerge for both, but they can also be bought in lots, from the €1.5m and €900k guide.

Brendan Bowe describes the hardstand carpark of 375sq m (4,000sq ft) as having “direct, autonomous access onto the public road and with an extraordinary outlook onto Kinsale harbour, James Fort and Charles Fort with all essential services adjacent.”

He adds it has location, outlook and address, with many examples of planning permissions granted for two and three storey homes on former plots and older residences.

“We believe with correct professional guidance, good design, and an application for permission from the planning authorities, that the opportunity to design and build a home of your dreams in an undisputed premier location and beautiful setting that is Scilly, Kinsale, now awaits.”

The timepiece bar and home upstairs is another story, how much it gets redeveloped and rebuilt, with its extraordinary patina of age inside in floors, stonewalls, exposed beams, with little to compare to to the amount of wear on the low-tread staircase. To describe it as threadbare is quite possibly to overstate its thread count.

Decor and furniture ranges from the shabby chic to the antique, chock-full of curios from floor to ceiling — there was a big clear-out ever before these photos were taken — and while the setting is marine, the bigger visual thread and theme is equine, historically at least.

The Platt family trace relations back to the 19th century horse breeder and trainer Henry Eyre Linde, known as Farmer Linde because of his regular harvest of race wins and who had built his own replica steeplechase track (modelled on Aintree) at his stud Eyrefield Lodge on the Curragh, still standing.

Harbour Bar’s selling agent Mr Bowe admits that the entire property needs modernisation but adds that “its potential is unlimited and its beauty in terms of its setting and outlook is hypnotic.”

“The Harbour Bar offers itself for sale as a once in a lifetime opportunity to acquire an iconic Scilly, Kinsale property with enormous potential within a unique and beautiful setting.”

Mr Bowe also states that increasingly Scilly “has been recognised as one of the finest locations, not only in Kinsale but across the country, attracting buyers from all over the globe.”

It’s buyer might indeed come from anywhere in the world. Or, they might be very close to hand?
VERDICT: Since covid times, many an Irish family has built its own private bar in their home, in a cabin, a shed or a basement. Here’s one that was prepared nearly two centuries ago.