Fuchsia Cottage is a rental, traditional Irish cottage located a few miles outside of Kenmare Ireland. Fuchsia Cottage is owned and managed by Maria and Joop Duyn who live right next door and also operate a furniture refinishing enterprise between the two houses. Fuchsia Cottage rents by the week and is simply a wonderful place. Maria and Joop have the place outfitted beautifully with everything a weekly renter could need. They also have Fuchsia listed on-line through TripAdvisor in a very convenient web-based reservation site. You can see the exact weeks that it rents for, and the rates which vary by the time of year. We were lucky enough to find Fuchsia available for the 6 days we were going to be in Kenmare. This was our third trip to Ireland but we had never rented a self-catering house before. There are tons available in this area, but this one was a real value. Fuchsia has a single bedroom downstairs, steps upstairs, a large and fully equipped kitchen / breakfast room with a fantastic view of Kenmare Bay. There is also a nice living / sitting room downstairs along with a hall bathroom. Upstairs you will find a main bedroom with a double/queen bed and a twin in one room (with a baby bed that can be added), a bathroom with shower, and a second bedroom with twin beds. Everything was spotless and we really enjoyed our stay. One of the best things was that Fuchsia has free WIFI available through a DSL connection over in Maria and Joop's house and with a remote WIFI router in Fuchsia. My wife and I travel with 5 WIFI enabled devices at our disposal and they all connected and operated just the way they should - Wonderful !!! We have no complaints at all about Fuchsia or Maria's management. We found the restaurants in Kenmare to be expensive for eating every night so my wife did cook at Fuchsia Cottage about half of the nights (a real money saver!). The kitchen had everything we needed beyond our food. In a self catering house like Fuchsia, you pay for your own utilities by comparing the meters when you arrive to when you leave. We lived pretty much as we would here in the States and it cost us about 25 euros for electricity and gas on top of the weekly rent. The only issue that we would raise with future potential renters is that the steps up to the second floor were somewhat steeper than one might normally find in a conventional stairs. Young children might have some trouble managing them alone. However, that is our only caution. We both felt that you could not do better than Fuchsia. The view was beautiful right through the windows, there was an outside sitting / picnic area and charcoal grill. It could be somewhat hard to find Fuchsia since it is on a small side street one one of the main roads out to Barra Peninsula on the road out of Kenmare , but their GPS coordinates brought us directly to the door. Thank you Maria and Joop..... Now if you could have gotten Mother Nature to give us some rain-free days, it would have been perfect !!! read more
