A graphic designer ‘imagineered’ her dream home

Asking price: €350,000

Agent: DNG Ella Dunphy (056) 7786000​

When graphic designer Sarah Burke was looking to buy her first home in 2020, she created a ‘vision board’, using her visual skills to ‘imagineer’ her dream property.

Meant as a visual representation of personal or professional goals, a vision board is a collage of images of the ideal you wish to achieve in your career or life.

In Burke’s case, pictures of rivers and lakes appeared prominently on the board, desperate as she was to live close to water.

And after 12 years renting in Dublin, she was hoping to buy in Kildare after moving back in with her parents there.

“When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I moved home,” she says. “Getting a house had become very difficult, but I was looking around and trying to save.

“The pandemic, in one sense, kind of helped me as I moved back to the family home in Kildare and saved, and within around eight months, I was able to apply for a mortgage.”

But finding a home near water in Kildare proved near impossible on Burke’s budget, but she did manage to stumble across a quirky property in Kilkenny, which hit the bullseye when it came to her most important requirement — being adjacent to water of some kind.

The Old Schoolhouse in Coon West, a few kilometres from Castlecomer, is a former technical school which had been converted into living accommodation after it was bought by a family in the 1960s.

When she went to look at it, the house was a veritable warren of rooms and needed refurbishment and some reconfiguration.

But what sealed the deal for Burke was a back garden bounded by the River Dinan, which runs along the rear of the property on its way to join the River Nore.

She now spends much of her time with her dog Chloe here among mature Scots pine and other larger trees.

“I go down every morning,” she says. “It’s a really peaceful, meditative place to sit in the morning with your coffee. There’s also a waterfall and a pool.

“Some of my family loves water and so they’d be using it to kind of jump off and swim in. I think it was the local swimming spot for locals.”

The Old Schoolhouse proved to be solidly built and for Burke, it had a pleasing symmetry on the eye.

The eight windows at the front of the building are perfectly proportioned to the millimetre, according to her.

It was constructed in the 1930s, utilising materials which had to be imported from Germany at the height of the State’s economic war with Britain.

The building had served as a technical school, where subjects such as woodwork, metalwork and home economics were taught, along with many other schools built around the country following the Vocational Education Act of 1930.

During the Second World War, it also became a seed-testing centre for local farmers.

The fabric of the house dates from 1936, but Burke’s input has encompassed new drylining, plumbing and electrics, as well as the installation of double glazing and the digging of a new private well. But lots of old classrooms didn’t suit Burke’s desired aesthetic.

“There could have been 10 rooms, I’d say, as well as a parlour and a hallway. So yeah, I started slowly and have been working on it for the last two/three years in fits and starts really.

“It has not been easy finding people to do the work, but my dad Jim and brother James did an enormous amount of it.

“Dad is in the business, so he kind of helped me — he gave me advice, and so on, and he did all the demolition work.

“We opened up the kitchen living area and did the dry lining. We put in new windows as there was just single-glazing before. That was the big job.

“We put in new insulation and new flooring obviously. The structure of the house was actually very good and we found no leaks.”

The current living accommodation, which has achieved a BER C3, includes an open-plan kitchen and dining area, utility, bathroom and four bedrooms.

There is an entrance hallway with laminate flooring and a PVC front door.

The kitchen, living and dining space is at the centre of the house and off this is a utility and a back hallway with storage.

The kitchen area is minimal and modern, but manages to maintain a country feel and has a polished aggregate floor. There is a wet-room-style bathroom, three double bedrooms and one single bedroom.

In total, there is 1,300 sq ft, as well as a number of small outbuildings and a newly installed shed. The garden has a number of fruit trees that produce apples and plums.

Coon Village, which is within easy walking distance, has a shop, a church and a pub, as well as one of the best children’s playgrounds in the locality.

“It’s a really tight-knit community. And they are really into the Tidy Towns, so I kind of helped with a few projects doing video work and signage and things like that. It was a really nice way to get to know people locally.”

Burke is now selling up, having moved back to a hybrid model of working at her company Think Tank, which requires her to be in Dublin more often.

“Initially, the commute was OK, but now we’re more in the office, it’s been tricky getting up and down. Also, I want to get a bit closer to my family with new nephews and nieces. I wish I could take the river with me though.”

Time to get that vision board out again.

Agent DNG Ella Dunphy envisions €350,000.