The decision to sell his dream home in Kilkenny is one of the hardest drummer Tom Ossander has had to make, but family commitments mean it's the right decision, writes CONOR POPE
WHEN TOM OSSANDER moved from New York City to Killarney in 1999, he had no idea how much his world was about to be turned upside down. After a decade criss-crossing America with a rock-n-roll band, the drummer was frazzled and needed a break. He moved to Ireland on a whim after seeing a picture of the newly-opened Old Head of Kinsale golf club in a magazine. Golf wasn’t his thing but he was taken by the spectacularly rugged beauty of the photograph.
Within months, he was working seven nights a week drumming with different bands in pubs and clubs around the Kingdom. Then a friend moved to Dublin and happened to go to an open mic night where she saw a little known singer-songwriter belt out a few tunes. She got talking to him and discovered he needed a drummer to play on an album he was trying to record, so she suggested he contact Ossander.
The singer was Damien Rice, the album was O, which has now sold more than two million copies worldwide. Its gentle beats – and those on Rice’s follow-up 9 – are Ossander’s. But the chance meeting did not just take the drummer onto the biggest US chat shows and into the living rooms and iPods of millions of people, it also led him directly to his partner Tanja Raab – the singer was renting a room in her Monkstown house at the time – and ultimately to a sprawling farmhouse on six acres just outside Thomastown in Co Kilkenny, where the pair have lived with their two children since 2005.
Hedgehog House, as they christened it, is a gorgeous property and with a price of €450,000, within reach of many would-be buyers keen to own a stylishly fitted out 19th-century 240sq m (2,583sq ft) farmhouse as well as a number of outhouses, some of which have been converted into living quarters. The agent is Clodagh Daly Auctioneers, John St, Kilkenny.
The five-bedroom property offers substantial accommodation while retaining its original charm. It is all stone walls and flagstone slabs and cottage-style windows but still manages to be bright and airy. Its extensive private grounds contain all manner of mature trees leaving it splashed with colour year round. There is an orchard, several large lawns, a two-acre field, a vegetable garden and a paddock, which until recently was home to several donkeys. The kitchen, with its mix of solid wooden and marble worktops, enjoys the morning sun, while light streams into the adjacent sunroom throughout the afternoon and evening. This dual aspect runs throughout the whole home.
The couple bought the place in 2005 after spending two years looking for a house in the country. Ossander knew nothing about Thomastown but when he saw the house advertised online he knew he had found what he was looking for. “It was made of stone, on land and was called after me, or I was called after it. We went down and saw it, and instantly we were like, ‘This is it’. It was the house we had been dreaming of.”
Selling this dream house “has been one of the hardest decisions we have ever made”, he says. Raab is German and they have no relatives in Ireland. “All that flexibility our friends get from having family close by, we don’t have. And we wanted the kids to have at least a year in school in Germany. We had to look at that in the long term. If we want to put them in school, then we didn’t want to yank them out. We want them to be settled.”
While both children love the property, the youngest might be forgiven for having a special affection for it as she came within an ace of being born here. Instead, she came into the world in a battered Volvo estate 12 minutes’ frantic drive from the house and 20 minutes from Waterford General Hospital after Raab went into rapid labour four year ago. Once it became clear the baby wasn’t waiting, Ossander pulled over, in a place called Luckswell as luck would have it, where their daughter was born minutes before an ambulance arrived.
Hedgehog House is three miles outside Thomastown, with its population of 1,500 people. Ossander clearly loves the place. “It is very close- knit and has all the amazing things you could want. There is a real sense of community, the bars are great and the place is filled with music and art and theatre,” he says.
But it’s goodbye to all that and hello to Berlin. “There we will be in the middle of everything and everything is within walking distance. There is a park on every block and the schools are great. But still, Ireland is home to me and this feels like leaving home. The bottom line is that I am not the most important thing anymore. I stopped being the most important thing in my world when our first child was born. Then I moved into third position and being in Berlin is what makes sense for them right now.”
