Nine years ago, Sharon Murphy and Mark O’Reilly swapped a life at sea for one by the sea. After 10 years of sailing and with a baby on the way, the Dublin couple, who were in their mid-thirties, decided it was time to find their land legs and settle down.
In 2002, while O’Reilly and Murphy were on a pit stop in Amsterdam, where the boat on which they were working as crew was being refitted, the couple set about house-hunting on the internet. It was then a relatively new way to find a home, but it came up trumps. When Murphy cast her eyes on a tumbledown cottage with four outbuildings on the peninsula of Kilcoe in West Cork, she knew she had found their dream home.
“We had been looking for somewhere along the coast, but we kept coming back to west Cork because it had a certain draw for us,” says Murphy. “Ideally, we wanted to spend €100,000 on a cottage. It would be somewhere for me to retire to for a while, have our baby and set up a base for ourselves. When we went to see the cottage in Kilcoe — even on a dull, wet and windy day in March, we knew it was for us.
“Even though the price was IR£235,000 (about €300,000), we bought it for just under ¤267,000. Although it was more than we had intended to spend, the place was calling to us.”
Murphy says that when she first saw the crumbling 1850s farmhouse, with its tumbledown barns, unkempt grounds and pigsties, she knew that it had potential not just as a home but also asa business.
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“Mark travelled around the world, working and sailing on super-yachts. I was a chef; he was on the maintenance side, before he got his skipper’s licence,” says Murphy. “We worked as a partnership. Once the baby came along, we were effectively out of business, so we wanted to move back to Ireland so we could be near family and settle.
“It wasn’t until we set our sights on the farmhouse in Kilcoe that we realised we could renovate something that could work as both a home and a business. We moved in and started work when I was eight months’ pregnant.”
Kilcoe is renowned for its scenery and celebrities — Jeremy Irons’s salmon-coloured Kilcoe Castle is a 15-minute walk away. A glut of artists live nearby, including the painters William Crozier and Ann Chambers. Murphy and O’Reilly’s 1.5-acre plot is 11km west of Skibbereen and nearly 5km east of the village of Ballydehob.
Almost a decade later than they had planned, Murphy, 45, and O’Reilly, 43, have completed their dream. Kilcoe Cottage, the rustic farmhouse that they renovated from a pile of stones and which they share with their two children, Fionn, eight, and Killian, seven, now plays host to a new holiday home on its land — a project that has taken six years to complete.
And there were plenty of rough patches along the way. First there was the financing of the project. When the couple bought the site, Ireland’s economy was in good shape. Murphy and O’Reilly, who had saved €100,000 during their decade of globe-trotting, decided to hold on to their cash and take out a mortgage for €180,000 on a total purchase cost of €288,000 (including fees). For the barn conversion, they would later take out a further €100,000, bringing the overall mortgage to €280,000.
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They also faced the problem of gaining planning permission in an area known for its stringent rules. “Getting permission to rebuild and finish our own home wasn’t the problem; it was the idea that we wanted to include guest accommodation that fell out of favour with the planners,” says Murphy.
“In our innocence, we thought that we should go for a shed design that was similar to the original barns, with a triangular-shaped roof. We also went for the maximum amount of accommodation allowed on that site: three self-catering units. But the planner was adamant that would not happen and, instead, we were told to downsize our plans and aim for a three-bedroom house.”
Renovation, refurbishment and living on a building site was something the family had to get used to over the past decade. Sleeves were rolled up, walls ripped out, floors pulled up, walls damp-proofed, new plumbing was installed and windows were replaced. The look of the original farmhouse was retained and efforts were made to keep mod cons such as satellite dishes and oil tanks hidden.
Even the ESB poles and overhead cables were replaced and put underground to help the old house settle back into its natural environment. Stone retrieved from a layer of old rock on the site was used to construct three hand-built stone walls.
The end product is a three-bedroom house with a kitchen, living and playroom.
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The guesthouse, was far more testing. It took two years to get planning permission. The couple hired a local building firm to convert a barn into five-star guest accommodation, but then they hit several snags. They hadn’t banked on weather interference, building delays and a property boom.
“When we started the job, we had no problem finding a reputable builder,” says Murphy. “After a break in the work, we found we simply couldn’t get a builder back in because there was a boom and builders were in big demand. So we had to wait another couple of years before we could get a builder to work on the site.”
In between, funds were drying up and the pair had to remortgage to ensure the guesthouse could be completed — at a far costlier rate than they had planned. They were forced to subsidise the project by finding extra work. O’Reilly had been a truck driver before the sailing expedition, so he returned to that job while also doing retro fits on boats in west Cork. His passion is racing and the ultimate sacrifice came when he was driven to sell his 1720 (class, not year) racing boat to help fund the couple’s dream.
“His only regret is having to sell his pride and joy to pay the electrician, the carpenter and the plumbing supplies company,” says Murphy, who runs a catering business as her contribution. “Otherwise, it was worth it.”
Today, the guesthouse offers 1,750 sq ft of elegant, but cosy, living space. It has two bedrooms, with en-suite bathrooms, a master bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and a sunroom. In the private garden is an eight-person hot tub with a view of Roaring Water Bay. Weekly rental costs range from €750 to €1,250 during the peak season. The couple also organise walking tours and boat trips, they can provide meals and will allow guests to borrow one of their two large cross-breed dogs, Brock and Tiny, for walks.
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Murphy says she has an enormous sense of achievement because of the years of work it took to get the farmhouse and guesthouse up and running. It has been character-building, she says. It is also proof for her that you can realise dreams, even with two young children, a restricted cash flow and a recession.
“To others who are thinking of doing the same — and there are plenty of cheap properties on the market that are ripe for renovation — be prepared to work hard,” she says. “Remember that this kind of business is seasonal. Getting the place up and running has motivated us to do even more.
“In the future we will have hens and maybe a piglet or two [to add to two goats and a growing collection of dogs] and the plan is to produce all our own fruit, vegetables and flowers, and sell them in a farm shop. But that’s for another day.”
Kilcoe Cottage, 028 38893, kilcoecottage.com