Naylor house and gardens in Durrus, West Cork.

There's hardly a lovelier stretch of road than the one leading down to the remarkable garden homestead and green sanctuary of renowned Irish garden designer Verney Naylor and her husband, geologist David, deep in a scenic and safe wooded valley above West Cork’s Durrus, just a few miles from the sea and Dunmanus Bay.

Verney Naylor has been designing Irish gardens since the 1970s, when she was a founder of the Garden & Landscape Designers Association (GLDA). In the near-half century since, her handiwork has flourished in designs as diverse as for the Japanese ambassador in Dublin, where oriental meets Ireland; and in the waters of West Cork for the likes of David and Patsy Puttnam on the Ilen river outside Skibbereen, at Baltimore’s Inis Beg Estates. 

Theatre set designer Bob Crowley is also among her many high-profile, happy, and appreciative clients: she has drawn plans for over 750 Irish gardens. She’s still working but an end of sorts is in sight as she and David (both are from the north of England) prepare to sell their Durrus Valley home and garden. They are moving to Washington in the US to be with family and grandchildren as they are now in their 80s.

The couple has also lived in England, Africa, and Canada for six years following David’s geology work and consultancy. He’s still an adjunct professor in Trinity College Dublin, where they met while he was a lecturer and she was a geography/natural sciences student, going on to embrace a span from rocks and synclines to the most precious skin of all — the Earth’s crust and soil.

However, Ireland has taken up most of their lives together and is where they have put down the most roots, both literally and metaphorically.

They bought this West Cork property in 1973, initially as a holiday hideaway in the wilds after Verney did studies around Toe Head. They only moved to the southwest full time in 2000 after they sold a Georgian home in Dublin, upgrading this property in three tranches under the eye of locally based, environmentally aware, and campaigning architect Tony Cohu.

Twenty years on, after the uprooting move from Dublin’s Sandymount, their Dromreagh, Durrus homestead is a fully realised project combining in equal measures sensitive house restoration and extension, and assured work in the landscape.

If you had to buy in this landscaping expertise, and season it with decades of maturity and “happy-at-home” plants, such as woodland with alder, mountain ash, winter-flowering witch hazels, rhododendron and bowers, wildflower meadow with cowslips, grasses, orchids and yellow rattle, what price could you put on it?

Well, in blunt terms, try a ballpark of €850,000, as estate agent, Colm Cleary of Schull-based James Lyons O’Keeffe guides this very special and utterly “at-home” property mix, with its assured and deft aesthetic, on its launch for summer 2022.

Thus, we’re visiting via a valley and a green road by Glanlough, down from a gap off the Ballydehob-Bantry road and the Barnnageehy Pass, on a quiet road ringed by scenic walking loops and marked trails, which leads then beyond, and down, to Durrus village and the sea.

Giving directions on a landline Verney Naylor helpfully explains: “We’re the first house, on the right after two miles from the gap.” It’s first, and easily found, but, two miles? It is, indeed an outlier, although the lower section of road (on the Durrus end) is now home to a few dozen more rent builds than this 19th-century stout valley survivor, so while it is out on its own, it’s not wholly remote.

The Naylors’ 40 natural acres is set amid sheep grazing and rough undulations cut through by a stream running down from heights above. It’s a buffer too, and indeed an antidote against other sections of this extensive valley’s blitzes of commercial forestry, much of it very recently felled, opening up ancient and immutable vistas once more. Comparing the monocultural planting and harvesting, versus the long haul of what’s here, is like comparing chalk and artisan cheese, and – thankfully — the reasserted beauty wins out.

Even the drive down on the narrow road is a delight, and just before the few miles are up, an excavated small pond below the wending track road is spotted: it’s the first sign of this couple’s sensitive, ecology-aware light touch on their land (dragonflies love the excavated pond, the woods hide a cuckoo), which they first encountered 50 years ago, and their boundary verges and ditches continue the evidence of working with not against, the landscape.

Then, after the beauty of the ditches (wild common orchids pop up on the other side of their boundary — it pays to keep the eyes peeled), the purity of the air, the sweep of grazing, lambs suckling, reeds and woods and hills and sea glimpses stir the heart and senses, to find a superbly conserved and extended traditional 19th-century farm at the core. It has been assuredly brought to a very high level of finish and comfort and warmth, thanks to things like a four-oven Aga, underfloor central heating, and two stoves (fed by stocks of cut and corded timber drying under a slate-roofed lean-to among old outbuildings), with a back-up generator in place to keep it all going, all-weather, independent if needs be.

Then, there are the gardens; stone flags and Liscannor flags with plants pushing up all over, the haggard; the meadow; the woods; the orchard; the potager or vegetable garden with potting shed and compost heaps, all worked and planted with patience, and knowledge, hand-in-(fox)glove with nature over decades. Nothing is, or appears, forced, with an easy, organic flow, both inside and outside, all of it the fruits of 50 years of ownership and the last 20 years of permanent, hands-on residence.

The kindness and sensitivity shown and allowed to bloom gently here might not come as a surprise to those who know their gardens, read about gardens, visit them, or simply admire them.

It’s a leitmotif of Verney Naylor’s landscape designs, typically naturalistic and informal, combining plant knowledge with the

planting of all-season gardens which, on all of the evidence here and beyond, get on with their own business of growth with no overweening maintenance demands.

Verney’s GLDA professional profile says her aim is “to create a balance between what is practical and possible, against what is fitting and beautiful. She likes her gardens to look as if they have evolved naturally from the landscape rather than being imposed upon it.”

This is no Chelsea Flower Show or celeb designer show-off garden. The biggest imports were a handful of large rocks brought in and landed by sling to create interest in a sheltered courtyard on the northern side of the long stone house, where mosses and lichens thrive by ferns and delicate maples.

“I get my boulders from Tim Joe O’Regan,” Verney says starting off a garden tour, almost as naturally as she might talk of a plant’s provenance, of her stone troughs, or of old urns and terracotta pots which form part of the more contained or precious arrivals in these grounds.

Over tea, an hour after the walkabout through gates, scythed paths, and wild meadow (appropriate Irish seeds from Sandro Cafolla/Design by Nature) she and David humorously tell of their own arrival and house-hunting days in West Cork which saw them fetch up at Dromreagh in the early 70s. They had canvased every local auctioneer, using the Yellow Pages, and only two ever got back to them, one being the late and legendary TD Paddy Sheehan of Goleen.

They told him their budget was £4,000. PJ Sheehan showed them several properties “all of which were £4,000” they note with a knowing smile, adding that, even then, West Cork’s coastal properties were typically out of reach at, oh, as much as £11,000.

They could only buy the unlived and derelict house back at that time on five acres as they say legislation at the time didn’t allow non-Irish buyers get more than that. When they bought, it had sills painted red, white, and blue, having been lived in for an earlier period by a staunch religious group.

They jumped, interior sight unseen, and purchased a property without electricity, without a water supply (bar a stream nearby), and without waste disposal.

It stayed basic living for years, with oil lamps and the like while their sons Sean and Mark were young, and they added land when they could, the bulk now let to local farmers and much of the rest left wild.

It really only “poshed up” in the essential, domestic bits to this very comfortable standard in 2000 when the couple had sold up very well in Dublin, with the Irish property market rocking at that decade’s start.

Their four-bed Claremont Road Georgian home on one-third of an acre soared past a €800,000 AMV to sell for €1.5m, according to online records. (It came back for sale a few short years after then for its next, Tiger times owner, who’d lavished further sums on the house, extended and put on a guest apartment, in 2005 guiding €3.5m.)

Down south, local West Cork builders, the Spillane brothers, were recommended for the work on this old house by the architect, and everything done was done thoroughly, over a three-year period which included spells cooking meals on an oven in the garage while the main house’s stone section, double aspect within thick walls, was being redone with due respect and deference to its past. It has a rough render inside, rounded window and door opes instead of sharp angles, external stone walls, slate roofs, hardwood or tiled floors, and simple, modest-sized double-glazed windows, all with a remarkable C2 BER.

About the only point of initial disagreement was deciding to add a small apex to the first-floor windows on the front elevation as they were set low to the floor (the house had been raised from single to two-storey in 1918) and the result is two brighter first-floor bedrooms and main bathroom in the original section.

It’s now a far larger house than ever before, with five bedrooms. The Naylors added a new back section, with two stories with the main en suite bedroom with generous viewing balcony over a large and lovely study/home office, where both have work desks – surrounded by books, books, and more tomes, references amassed over decades of professional work, amid a wide-ranging book collection that stretches from room to room.

Bookshelves also line nearly every other room, and much of a rear, long, glazed link corridor across the back of the house, tying in now by ‘the nook,’ to a converted former calf house, where the original roof trusses with wooden dowels have been kept in an utterly atmospheric main reception room – home among many visual treats to a gleaming grand piano and with, of course, garden access.

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of garden access points for a property that’s as much about the outdoors as the interiors which all work off a calm colour palette of greens (olive?) and buttery, mustardy yellows, with the powerhouse four-oven Aga also a mustard shade.

Joinery is to a very high level, including new stairs (one of two) by gleaming kitchen in pale solid timber (alder?) made by craftsman Larry Twomey, with a small island, which features several inset of granite in timber tops, a neat, diner-like window seat and the smartest low-level insert ever... “Verney’s drawers”.

When designing the kitchen with the carpenter, she asked why there was dead space by the kickboards under the units. Why, indeed? She had sliding drawers made to match down at foot level, ideal for storing occasionally used, but essential items, such as large serving plates, baking trays, and casserole ware.

It’s such a good idea, the carpenter has offered “Verney’s Drawers” to others. Here, at their creator’s home, they’re just some of the myriad and clever storage spaces smuggled in all over (the lofted space over the bone-dry double garage is home to archives, garden and landscape sketches, working drawing, diaries, and notebooks over 50-year output, it’s some trove).

Preparing to move and deciding what to keep and what can’t travel the Atlantic with them, will be herculean, and one of their easier tasks is drawing up, yet keeping concise, a list of plants and garden features for selling agent Colm Cleary, who reckons his buyers could come from nearby, or more than likely as exotics from overseas getting a readymade garden wonder, and exceptionally well-done West Cork homestead, off the beaten track and Wild Atlantic Way – but only just, a mere two miles into beauty.

VERDICT: What an uprooting, but what a legacy. The Naylors will miss it all, most of all the setting and views. The proudest achievement is “Verney’s Drawers”, she reckons modestly.

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