Mermaid Isle, a waterfront property in Co Kerry, inspired its owner to create marine exhibits for museums across the US, writes Orna Mulcahy, Property Editor
IN THE years that Kevin and Lori O'Farrell have owned Mermaid Isle, a 25-acre waterfront property on the Ring of Kerry, they've accumulated an awful lot of wetsuits.
"We have 27 in all, so we can kit out tall, small, fat or thin people," says Kevin O'Farrell, a Californian museum designer and author who came to Sneem for three weeks in 1984 and stayed for 23 years.
Hidden away down a boreen between Sneem and Caherdaniel, Mermaid Isle is marine heaven with two houses facing out to sea where dolphins cruise the rockpools and seals swim under the livingroom windows.
The main house, which has the sea on three sides, is a striking 418sq m (4,500sq ft) timber building based on the design of 14th century Irish barns and warmed by the stoves fuelled by turf cut on the property. There's also a cute one-bedroom guest cottage and two party-sized hot tubs right on the water.
The clear waters teem with creatures that have inspired countless marine exhibitions across the US, and tempted friends to swim and snorkel day and night using those wetsuits.
Kevin O'Farrell is an artist and author who in a previous life designed the Budweiser bottle and works with several institutions, including San Francisco Zoo and the Boston Children's Museum. In Ireland he's a consultant for the OPW on national monuments, and is also working on a book on Brendan the Navigator.
The couple's children have grown up and returned to the States, and the time has come to join them, hence the sale. Mermaid Isle is for sale through Cork agent Kevin Barry, asking €7.5 million.
The O'Farrells came to Ireland in 1984 to work on a commission painting of dinosaurs, but "after two weeks we'd gotten to know everyone from Kenmare to Caherdaniel", says Kevin. They started househunting, and found an old fisherman's cottage down on the water that locals said had been a landing spot for mermaids. It also had to function as a home office and studio.
"It took us eight years of serious politicking to get a phone line down here," he says. In the early years he ran his office out of the Sneem House pub which had the one public phone in town.
The O'Farrells lived in the cottage for many years, while working on the main house, which is built using giant beams of Douglas Fir from the Wicklow hills, a fabulous array of windows salvaged from the Bon Secours convent in Cork and timber from an entire church in rural Co Cork. It has six bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a large kitchen where stainless steel appliances are hidden behind antique pine confessional doors.
Who will be buy it? "It's really a home for nature nuts," says O'Farrell. "There are people out there who want to be able to live this close to the water, and to have all this privacy."
