1970s split-level bungalow in Watergrasshill has a built-in church organ
Location: Watergrasshill €295,000
Size: 134 sq m (1,450 sq ft)
Bedrooms: 3
Bathrooms: 2
BER: E2
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Talented church organist Dermot Locke and his wife, Valda, built this split-level bungalow in the 1970s: he spent many years slowly assembling and fitting a suitably uplifting church organ into a high-ceilinged section of his new-build, having acquired it from the old Methodist Church in Tralee.
“We got it in 1978, and set about it as a Millennium goal, but just missed by a year: however, we had it playing a year later, in 2001,” reveals Mr Locke.
He’s currently the church organist in St Luke’s Church, in Douglas, Cork, and has also played in many other churches around the city. He started playing as a teenager, after previously learning piano, in St Mary’s Shandon, where his father, Richard (Dick) Locke, had finished his tenure as organist.
Now, as Dermot and Valda, a church singer, prepare to trade-down out of Camlin, they explain that it’s far easier to sell their home with the organ in situ, as a ‘turn-key’ gift to new owners.
“I used to joke the only way it would come out was with a chainsaw,” he quips, describing the organ’s tone as “very softly voiced, it’s no louder than many other instruments, maybe like a piano being played loudly.”
The organ, with two keyboards and three stops, rises to 15’ at its maximum, and so is considered compact - in relative church organ terms, that is.
To anyone else, it is surround sound personified, pedalled and pumped, not wired.
It was made in 1890, in Huddersfield, by a James Conacher, whose better-know brother, Peter, also made several church organs now in Cork, according to Mr Locke who says the value of even quite fine organs is determined by who can take them away and reinstall them elsewhere.
This one is firmly attached to the Locke family’s 1,450 sq ft, well-kept home on an acre of manicured gardens, and all of the house’s main rooms face south.
The agent for this Watergrasshill home on an acre is Malcolm Tyrrell, of Cohalan Downing, guiding at €295,000, and he is, eh, pulling out all the stops, in this note-able sale.
: The pipes, the pipes are calling
