Built for a long life, and well into one.
The Grove was raised in the 1870s, in the quiet hinterland between Muff and the city of Derry. It was built solidly, thick walls, deep foundations, ten-foot ceilings on the ground floor, in the way that Victorian builders built when they expected a house to outlast them by a century or more.
It has done exactly that. The pitch pine porch floor is still there. The cast-iron fireplaces are still in their rooms. The coving in the drawing room still runs unbroken around all four walls. The slate-and-tile hearth in the study, the oak handrail on the stairs, the broad pine floorboards underfoot, all original, all intact, all waiting.
What it asks for now is a sympathetic hand. Not a gut renovation that sweeps the past out, but a careful refurbishment that keeps what's good, replaces what's tired, and lets the house do what it has always done, be a comfortable, generous, properly Irish country home.