Trading up from golf homes in Co Kilkenny

Mount Juliet: from €1.65mIreland has an ever increasing number of country clubs with on-site holiday homes, leisure centres and hotels. To a great many people, Mount Juliet in Kilkenny is still the most prestigious and stylish of them all because the 1,500-acre estate maintains its old world ambience.

A great many of the country clubs that have emerged in recent years seem anxious to build as many holiday homes as possible to generate a sufficient level of business to keep the operation ticking over. Unlike most of the others, Mount Juliet has rigidly stuck to a low density development.

Although Mount Juliet developed its first holiday homes more than 15 years ago, it still has completed only 90 units, most of them hidden away in courtyards. A number of individual homes are dotted around the estate either on sloping sites or concealed by mature woodlands. Because of the prestige of owning a home in Mount Juliet, the estate's head of property, Pat Hegarty, has always managed to sell new properties off plans. This has also applied to a current development at the Walled Garden where a 10-house cluster is under construction with a November completion date anticipated. These four-bedroom houses with floor areas around 280sq m (3,013sq ft) have been acquired, mainly by Dublin buyers, at €1.9 million each.

Mount Juliet currently has three houses for sale, two of them in Waltons Grove, where the owners plans to trade up to larger homes on the estate. A three-bedroom unit, including furniture, is available at €1.65 million while a four-bedroom home is priced at €1.9 million.

Also for sale is a particularly spacious house on its own site currently owned by a Florida-based businessman.

The five-bedroom, 427.3sq m (4,600sq ft) house, The Glen, costs €4 million.