CO KILDARE: €835,000A former gardener's cottage within Castletown Demesne is for sale for the first time in over 30 years
A VICTORIAN cottage in the grounds of Castletown Demesne in Celbridge, Co Kildare has come on the market asking €835,000.
Savills is selling The Garden House, a cottage built for the head gardener of the estate in the 1860s, and sold on to the current owners in 1977.
The house stands on an acre of walled grounds, surrounded by woodland that, like the rest of the 120-acre Castletown Demesne, is open to the public. It’s a seven-minute walk through the woods to Castletown House, the stately home built in 1722 by William Connolly and considered Ireland’s grandest house.
The estate was broken up in 1968 with the house and surrounding land sold to Desmond Guinness of the Irish Georgian Society. It has since passed into the care of the Office of Public Works.
Access to The Garden House is via the main entrance to Castletown.
It’s about half a mile into the estate and is accessed via a separate tree-lined driveway over which it has right of way.
It adjoins a modern housing estate built in the demesne in the 1970s.
The Garden House, originally known as Victoria Cottage and later as Red Cottage, was built as a home for the estate’s head gardener and also to create a grand entrance to the estate’s complex of glasshouses which at one time produced a wide range of tropical fruits and vines.
The glasshouses have since been demolished and the house now stands alone.
Its grounds include a lawn tennis court and some old stone outbuildings, notably a forge, an apple house and a guest house that has not been used since the 1970s.
The Garden House has a surprisingly elaborate interior with several Gothic flourishes, particularly in the spacious double hallway which is decorated with elaborate plasterwork and barley twist columns.
It’s a spacious four-bedroom house with 225sq m (2,422sq ft) of living space, including two interconnecting reception rooms, a study and a library.
Off the hall is a conservatory-style garden room – a nod to the history of the house.
The owners, who raised three children here, added an extension as soon as they moved in in the late 1970s.
New owners may well decide to demolish this blockish addition which makes no attempt to blend with the original.
In fact, the house needs modernisation throughout, according to selling agent David Ashmore, though a new heating system was recently installed.
Savills notes that the property is 13.5 miles from St Stephen’s Green, though new owners will probably be buying the house as a getaway from the city.
*Elsewhere in Celbridge, a successful auction was held yesterday for a bungalow on half an acre at Kiladan, Primrose Hill. The bungalow, which had extensive fire damage, was auctioned by Sherry FitzGerald O'Reilly with a reserve of €275,000 but went on to sell for €365,000 under the hammer.
