Blue Water, Kinvara, Co Galway Asking value: €650,000 Agent: Keane Mahony Smith 091 563744
material art work in the form of a Sumatran elephant would normally look misplaced in the doorway corridor of a west of Ireland home. But at Blue Water, a coastal hideaway in Kinvara, the elephant is a nod to proprietor Joanne Reilly’s life story.
While she was doing her science doctorate in tropical ecology, Reilly spent years travelling to Indonesia to work with endangered species equivalent to Sumatran elephants and rhinos. She developed some pores and skin issues after a fieldwork journey to Sumatra and the beginning of her eldest little one, and seen how Sumatrans at all times turned to native flora for pure treatments.
Reilly started formulating her personal natural skincare merchandise, utilizing botanical extracts. She launched the Kinvara Skincare vary of plant-based, environmentally pleasant pores and skin therapies in 2012 and acquired a home with her husband Ciarán Kelly in the village the next 12 months.
“I known as my skincare after the place as a result of to me, Kinvara symbolises wild, pure magnificence with the affect of the ocean and the Burren,” the scientist-turned-entrepreneur says. “It’s a magical place.”
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Joanne Reilly and Ciarán Kelly
Joanne Reilly and Ciarán Kelly
On a transparent summer time’s day, the view from Blue Water resembles a tropical paradise. From its perch 4 metres above the high-water mark, the 1,851-sq ft home instructions views throughout the southeastern shores of Galway Bay, the rugged rolling hills of the Burren, and the dry stone partitions which can be so explicit to Co Galway.
The property was initially constructed in 1995 by an American lady known as Sayre Shallow, who ran a restaurant in Kinvara.
“She died just a few years in the past however left a stunning constructing to the individuals of the village known as Tígh Sayre that’s used as a neighborhood drop-in facility,” Reilly says.
Another of Shallow’s legacies are the connecting ponds she constructed in her backyard; set amid Burren flagstones, the form of those ponds mirror that of the close by coastal inlets. At the underside of the backyard, which Shallow planted with cherry, apple and pear bushes, a small gate leads to Crushoa Pier, the place Reilly, Kelly and their two daughters used to swim earlier than placing Blue Water on the market.
On high quality days, Kelly, a marine biologist and a director on the Marine Institute, would sail from the pier to his office at Rinville, outdoors Oranmore. The pier additionally varieties a part of the Special Area of Conservation (SAC) for wildlife that runs round Galway Bay.
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An exterior view of the home which is positioned in a Special Area of Conservation (SAC)
An exterior view of the home which is positioned in a Special Area of Conservation (SAC)
“We have hares that come up the driveway and a pheasant we known as Percy that comes into the backyard,” Kelly says. “The place is crawling with wildlife, and there are otters down by the pier.”
For the outside of the property, Shallow sought to emulate a Georgian villa in Kinvara known as Delamain Lodge, copying its pitched slate roof and a round-headed door opening round a timber-panelled door full with fanlight and sidelights.
“But inside, the home was all-American, with a big open-plan room that had a cathedral window off the kitchen,” Kelly says.
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The home has three double bedrooms
The home has three double bedrooms
“She had been residing there as a single lady in the Nineties and early 2000s, and by all accounts it was an incredible social gathering home. When we introduced tradespeople in to renovate it, some would go searching and say, ‘I feel I used to be right here earlier than at some mad social gathering’.
“It was initially designed as a three-bed home, however she had it arrange as a celebration home. It had an enormous kitchen — 7.5m by 5.5m — in one huge cathedral-style room. The different a part of that room had a bar in one nook and a dancefloor – you possibly can nonetheless see stiletto-heel marks on the ground.”
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The elephant statue in the doorway corridor
The elephant statue in the doorway corridor
What Kelly and Reilly did admire was the property’s location — getting planning permission to construct a home from scratch so shut to the ocean and an SAC can be unlikely nowadays. Each room of the home has a view of a pond, the ocean or the Burren hills and the couple have been “fully charmed by the way in which outside and indoors are linked,” Kelly says.
This hyperlink between nature and the indoors impressed the pair to name the home Blue Water, after The Blue Water resort on the shores of Wadduwa Beach in Sri Lanka. Just two years after the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean devastated elements of Sri Lanka, the couple stayed on the resort, which was designed by native architect Geoffrey Bawa.
The architect was a pioneer of tropical modernism, a design motion that mixes sensitivity for native context with modernist parts equivalent to wide-open areas, a spotlight on native assets and constructing supplies, open views, and elevated air flow.
At Kinvara’s personal Blue Water, Reilly and Kelly renovated it with family residing in thoughts. They employed Galway-based kitchen designer Mark Hand, additionally an artist who works on stage units and props for movie and TV, to construct a construction throughout the authentic essential room that divided it right into a kitchen/diner, a utility room, a pantry with sliding doorways, and a sitting room.
Reilly and Kelly break up Shallow’s massive rest room in two to create an ensuite for the master suite and a visitor rest room.
Despite the tweaks, the kitchen remains to be super-sized, and is flooded with pure gentle all 12 months spherical, thanks to that cathedral-style window at its gable finish.
The kitchen/diner connects to the dual-aspect entrance lounge, which has a comfy really feel thanks to overhead beams and a strong gas range.
The home has three double bedrooms and a contemporary-style home workplace. The latter was initially a den for the kids and had been fitted with an overhead projector so they might watch movies. But when Covid struck, compelling Kelly and Reilly to work from home, the couple “commandeered” the den and remodeled it into a wise examine.
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A path from the backyard leads to Crushoa Pier
A path from the backyard leads to Crushoa Pier
The main bedroom has French double doorways opening onto the again backyard. Its ensuite is a full rest room, fitted with a double sink and a free-standing tub. There are fairly blue-and-white mosaic tiles to the ground and to the walk-in bathe.
Blue Water is promoting for €650,000 by the Keane Mahony Smithestate company.
