Forgefield House, Kilkea, Co Kildare
Forgefield is a "Victorian" country house with all the features you might expect – fine ceiling plasterwork, tall sash windows, marble or cast-iron fireplaces with tiles inset – but it was built in 2006. Designed to fit in with its neighbours in the village of Kilkea, Co Kildare, it's built of limestone on land that once belonged to a local smithy near the entrance to Kilkea Castle.
Its style is old world, down to the back staircase that leads from the kitchen quarters up to the second floor and the chute from the main bedroom to the laundry room downstairs. And yet it’s completely modern with underfloor heating upstairs and down, double-glazed windows, central vacuuming, solar panels to boost the heating and en suites in every bedroom.
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The owners are downsizing and Forgefield, a 530sq m (5,705sq ft) four-bedroom house with a separate 35sq m (380sq ft) studio and a 103sq m (1,100sq ft) garage is for sale by private treaty through Sotheby’s International Realty for €950,000. It sits on 1.77 acres of gardens and a line of tall aspens marks the boundary. Fields behind the house stretch for miles with distant views of hills.
The front door with leaded fanlight above opens past a wide arch into a very wide baronial-style reception room, currently set out as a diningroom with a table for 12 at its centre. A chandelier hangs over the table from the top floor, past the handsome curved staircase which circles up to a galleried landing. Floors of reclaimed French oak are among many reclaimed features, such as doors and fireplaces, in Forgefield.
A very large timber mantelpiece surrounds the fireplace on the left, which unusually, interconnects with the fireplace in the drawingroom. Doors on either side of the front hall lead into the drawingroom on the left and a small library on the right.
Second kitchen
The slate-floored kitchen/ breakfastroom-cum-sunroom stretches across the back of the house. It’s a bright space with a wide bay window in the kitchen and near floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunroom.
The kitchen has a double black Aga cooker inset into an alcove with bright painted tiles, a timber-topped island unit and a small home office in one corner. A number of small rooms – a second kitchen with another cooker, a study and a laundry room (with the chute) – open off the main kitchen.
The sunroom has a raised indoor bed for herbs and double doors that fold back opening onto a deck. The separate artist’s studio in the garden could possibly be converted into living quarters.
Upstairs, the large main bedroom has a bay window and a door onto a balcony with views over open countryside. It has a good-sized dressingroom and a large en suite bathroom with bath and shower. The remaining three bedrooms are all large doubles with en suites and built-in wardrobes.
Stairs lead up to a large carpeted attic space with lots of windows, which could be converted into quarters for an au pair or a teenager.
Forgefield is very near the entrance gates to Kilkea Castle, the 12th century castle once run as a luxury hotel, now closed. It’s 4km from Athy, where there’s a train service to Dublin; the train takes about an hour, as does the drive to Dublin on the M9.
The Old Rectory, Ashford, Co Wicklow
When local Church of Ireland parishioners in Ashford, Co Wicklow – including playwright JM Synge’s family, who lived in nearby Glanmore Castle – built a home for their rector in 1878, they did him proud. The 341sq m (3,670sq ft) Victorian house on four acres cost £1,589.10s. Now, 138 years later, the Old Rectory is for sale for €1.5 million through Sherry FitzGerald.
The property was a rectory for many years. Author Gordon Thomas bought it in the 1970s and the current owners have lived here for 24 years. The Victorian five-bedroom house has been modernised but many of its period features and its layout are unchanged.
The house looks pretty much as it must have when the Rev GM Drought moved in. Original documents given to the current owners by Thomas detail the building costs and include such listings as “4 marble Chimney pieces . . . £7” and “Servants Room – 1 Rim Lock & Brass furniture . . . 2.6”.
The large, beautifully-maintained gardens, which wrap around the house, are one of its chief attractions. Designed by the same person who designed nearby Mount Usher, according to the agent, it has tall trees including cedar, beech and magnolia, which were probably planted in the 1870s and which give the house great privacy. The Old Rectory comes with a coach house, a stable block for horses with several loose boxes and a floodlit sand arena, and a disused indoor swimming pool in a separate large building.
Gates in a stone wall open on to a gravelled drive that circles around to the front of the house. A large front door opens into a small porch with its original tiles and from there into a hall floored more recently with beige tiles. The grandest room in the house is the drawingroom on the left, which has a white marble fireplace, deep ceiling coving and tall sash windows framed by cream drapes.
There’s a smaller TV/family room on the right and a formal diningroom down the hall, both with marble fireplaces.
Between them is a very posh downstairs toilet, with a wall of built-in bookcases and a shower tucked in the corner.
The rear of the house hasn’t had the kind of modern makeover popular in the Tiger years. There are a number of small rooms off the main kitchen and new owners might want to create a more open-plan space.
The back hall, with the original servants’ bells still hanging on the wall, leads to a large country-style kitchen cum breakfastroom floored with original red tiles.
Cream units made by a local builder are topped with a reddish-brown polished granite countertop. A large Aga sits into an alcove backed with glossy green tiles, below a timber mantel. French doors open onto a patio in the garden at the side of the house. There’s plenty of room to extend here, possibly to build a conservatory.
There’s a small office/TV room off the kitchen, a pantry, a utility room and a boot room where the family leaves riding boots and gear.
The back of the house opens into an enclosed courtyard facing the two-storey coach house.
The Old Rectory is a bright house, with dual aspect windows in a number of rooms. The stairs and upstairs landing are particularly bright because of a large window halfway up the stairs.
Five large bedrooms open off the top floor, painted in pastel shades, nicely decorated and fitted with wardrobes. The main bedroom has a small en suite shower room.
The family bathroom is even posher than the downstairs loo: it has a polished timber floor, red wallpaper and a claw-foot bath next to the window.
The 122sq m (1,313sq ft) two-storey coach house behind the main house has been used as a studio-cum-office space but could be converted into separate accommodation. In a building as big as another house there is a disused swimming pool. The garden slopes up towards the stables and the field for horses.
The Old Rectory is about five minutes’ drive from the centre of Ashford. ‘
