A herd of deer is included in the €1.85 million price of Annamult House on 25.5 acres in Co Kilkenny, writes Michael Parsons
THE TEMPERANCE movement's Father Matthew hasn't quite taken over the running of the Shelbourne Hotel's Horseshoe Bar but the "irrational exuberance" which caused property and share prices to soar has given way to what glum economists call "asset price deflation".
So what is fair value? Annamult House on 25.5 acres with half-a-mile of superb river frontage is, according to the agent, priced to sell.
The owners, John Sheils, the founder and chairman of Voice Newspapers, and his fashion-designer wife Susan, are relocating back to Dublin for family reasons.
They bought the property at auction for €2.15 million in May 2005 and it is now for sale, for €1.85 million, by private treaty with Savills HOK.
The substantial 19th century house is set in the serenely beautiful Nore valley close to Bennettsbridge, the crafts village famed for Mosse Pottery and Chesneau Leather. Kilkenny city - just a few miles away - has good rail connections and there's proximate access to an interchange on the soon-to-be-completed M9 Dublin to Waterford motorway.
The location is an area of tranquil beauty beloved of Hubert Butler, the celebrated essayist who lived at neighbouring Maidenhall.
The house overlooks river meadows which once teemed with merino sheep imported from Spain. Two centuries ago, the fabled Annamult Woollen Mills were producing cloth for the Prince Regent when Dolce Gabbana's urchin forebears were still scrambling for coins tossed by Grand Tour toffs in the back-streets of Naples.
Travel writer Stephen Rynne declared himself smitten by the cornucopia landscape where gardens, wheat-fields, groves and orchards look as if spilled out over gentle slopes.
The attractive, seven-bedroom, listed house has 702 sq m (7,556 sq ft) of gracious living space. A New York couple during a recent visit remarked that the main bathroom was bigger than their Manhattan apartment.
The reception rooms are Country Life classics spacious enough to accommodate a hunt ball without disturbing the fireside peace of great-aunt Fanny slumbering with her broderie anglaise, a sozzled Uncle Bertie cleaning his favourite Purdey and an Irish wolfhound lolling comfortably on the hearth.
The pheasant-stocked grounds offer private, majestically-wooded walks and enviable frontage onto the King'sRiver, a tributary of the Nore renowned for its salmon and trout fishing and the death, by drowning, of a High King.
Here you can swim with otters or paddle your own canoe down to Thomastown and idyllic Inistioge. The setting is so sublimely sylvan you half expect to meet Robin Hood and Maid Marian ambling over to nearby Mount Juliet for roast haunch of venison and foaming beakers of Smithwick's ale.
Some house buyers get a tiling allowance or perhaps some kitchen appliances thrown in by generous - or desperate - developers. They do things differently in the country.
The buyer of Annamult House will become the proud new owner of a herd of Japanese sika deer included in the sale price. These will thrill your weekend house-party guests. If Uncle Bertie hasn't sobered up and shot them all.
