RORY McILROY has put his home in Northern Ireland up for sale with an asking price of £2 million. The world number one golfer and two-time Major champion is moving on from Robinhall House, the lavish home he purchased in 2009 near Carryduff, Co Down.
A spokesman for McIlroy said he is not quitting Northern Ireland for good. The 23-year-old has a number of properties there, including a smaller one close to his parents’ home in Holywood, Co Down.
Robinhall House is a bachelor pad on the large scale. The 6,000 sq ft property in Moneyreagh, near Carryduff, sits on 14 acres and includes a golf practice area with four greens and a driving range.
In a statement McIlroy said: “Unfortunately, I have had to make the difficult decision to sell my house in Moneyreagh. It has been an extremely difficult decision as I have invested so much both financially and emotionally in the house and practice facilities there.
“However, with my global tournament schedule and ever-increasing schedule in the US, I am now only making it back home to Northern Ireland for a couple of weeks here and there during the summer months and at Christmas time.”
There has been speculation that McIlroy will make a permanent move to the US to be closer to PGA tournaments and his girlfriend, Danish tennis star Caroline Wozniacki. However, his spokesman said he had no plans to buy a property in the US.
Robinhall House, a five-bedroom property behind electronic gates, is straight from the set of MTV’s Cribs. It features sprawling black leather furniture, a surround sound cinema room and rawhide on the floors. The black high-gloss kitchen is sleek and there is little to indicate that McIlroy has been rustling up hearty family fare from the shiny black Aga range.
The house was built in 2006. McIlroy bought it in 2009 and developed the grounds. It featured in a BBC documentary last year in which he showed off the specially laid practice area he had developed – two of the greens feature bent grass to US PGA standard while the other two greens are of fescue grass similar to European tour requirements.
A full-time greenkeeper has been employed to look after the facility where the bunkers include a replica of the Road Hole bunker in front of the 17th green on the Old Course at St Andrews in Scotland. The driving range has a number of tee positions and there is a Fifa-standard Astroturf putting green to complete the practice area. A stone barn has been converted to a fully equipped gym. There is also an all-weather tennis court and a scaled down pitch for five-a-side football.
McIllroy has been a high profile figure in recent weeks on account of winning two important US tournaments to strengthen his world number one ranking and also because of his comments that he has “always felt more British than Irish”, made in the context of whether he would represent Ireland or Britain at the 2016 Olympics.
