Writer's holiday home is pretty in pink

Edna O'Brien is selling her holiday home in Donegal, reports Property Editor Orna Mulcahy

WRITER Edna O'Brien's Donegal bolt-hole is about as remote as you can get. Her pink house by the water in the Rosses Gaeltacht, near Dunloe is not easily found, unless you arrive by plane to Donegal's tiny Carrickfin airport, a 40-minute flight from Dublin.

Then you can simply walk the rest of the way, across a causeway, up the road, down and around and around again, past the modern house, past the house that looks like a little church, and on until you come to The Pink House.

It's in a slight dip below the road, hidden by willows but you have to step inside to appreciate its lovely location for the house is on an acre of headland, overlooking a beach with its own jetty and boathouse.

It's a magical setting where O'Brien has hosted parties and entertained her grandchildren who can spend all day on the beach just below the livingroom's French doors. But the four-bedroom house is no longer practical for 76-year-old O'Brien, who doesn't drive and who lives for most of the year in London.

There, in a little room in her Chelsea townhouse, she finds that she can write - she's currently working on a musical of her 1960 novel The Country Girls to be staged in San Francisco. "Donegal is for outdoor things. I found I couldn't write here at all," she says and so she is reluctantly putting the modern house, designed by her son the architect Sasha Gebler, on the market. It's for sale through Franklin Auctioneers of Letterkenny with an asking price of €850,000.

The L-shaped house will suit anyone with a brood of children to entertain all summer, or wealthy buyers who long for tranquillity but need their comforts too.

"It's an extremely warm and well insulated house so that, when the wind howls outside, you hear and feel nothing," says Sasha who insisted on extra sound insulation for his mother's bedroom so that she could be entirely peaceful.

The cold is not allowed to penetrate anywhere. In the big room that is the heart of the house, ornate French chairs are pulled up to a carved stone fireplace where a fire blazes. This is the room where the family congregate, and it has plenty of room for a crowd, with a raised area, complete with piano, that's ideal for putting on plays.

From here, a corridor leads off to the first of the bedrooms, a guest room with a gorgeous view of the mussel beds on the beach below, and ambitious choice of reading material teetering on a narrow bookcase outside the door.

There is Joyce here, and more Joyce. Beyond is the first of the bathrooms, and further along is the "rock room" - a room that is literally carved out of the granite, and was intended to take a sauna and a Jacuzzi. New owners can finish this project, or adapt the space differently.

On the other side of the house and leading off the central hall is the kitchen, a long double height room that was the original cottage in its entirety. This was what O'Brien bought in the late 1990s, having searched the county for over a year.

"It was a friend who found it. He was flying overhead, and he saw that it was for sale," she says.

The tiny cottage was a year long project for Sasha, whose company Gebler Tooth, specialises in restaurant and hotel renovations, notably the Soho House chain. His idea for The Pink House was to give it the kind of space you'd expect to find in a grand country house.

"It's quite hard to find cottages with big rooms so the idea here was to build a cottage that would feel like a big house," he says. Now the kitchen cum diningroom can take 20 for dinner, and it too is toasty warm with an Aga at the kitchen end and a wood-burning stove by the dining table.

In summer the back door is left open onto the springy turf garden which tumbles down to the rocks.

The entrance hall, between the kitchen and the big room, has a fine staircase rising past a window with a sill deep enough to sit on and enjoy the 180-degree views.

Upstairs, the first of the bedrooms is a family-sized blue room with a vaulted ceiling allowing for a mezzanine over the bathroom.

A corridor with floor-to-ceiling built-in cupboards takes one on to the second bedroom beyond which is a large luxuriously tiled bathroom, and then the main bedroom, a cathedral-like space with deep red walls and velvet bedding adding to the hushed atmosphere.

"It is rather church-like," says Sasha, though new owners with young children will appreciate that extra insulation.

O'Brien is hoping to find something a little more manageable, and accessible in Ireland, though she doesn't think she'll ever find a house as beautiful as The Pink House. And though remote, it is far from isolated. As in almost every scenic corner of Donegal there are cottages all around, not all in the best of taste. O'Brien's house does its best not to be noticed. The impact is all inside, looking out over the water. Supplies can be got from the village of Annagry, five miles away, and home to workshops of the famous Crolly Doll. Letterkenny is about an hour away, through the magical landscape of the Glenveagh National Park.