Eco House: Back on the market at €495,000 - half the 2006 price

Eco House was designed as a cutting-edge environmentally friendly home back in the early noughties, featuring in Duncan Stewart’s About the House programme on RTÉ.

Built in 2004 by engineer Peter Bonsall for his family, it sold at auction in 2006 for €1.3 million, €200,000 over the €1.1 million guide price.

Now, 10 years on, the house at the bottom of a cul-de-sac in Shankill has been placed on the market with an asking price of €495,000 through Hunters estate agents.

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On the market a week, and clearly priced to sell as it’s a receiver sale, agent James Douglas of Hunters says there has already been an offer above the asking price.

Eco credentials

The three-bedroom 186sq m (2,002sq ft) detached house has been empty for at least 18 months. Given that, it’s in reasonably good shape, although new buyers will need to spruce it up.

They’ll also have to do their own assessment of the value of its eco credentials, since there are no current estimates of its energy bills (and the ESB cut off supply some time ago). It has a B3 BER rating, according to the brochure.

Bonsall, an Irish timber and intelligent home specialist, worked with UK environmental architects Cole Thompson Anders to design the house as a sustainable home run on high-tech gadgetry: it has features such as sheep wool insulation and a grass roof.

The single-storey timber-frame house’s layout is simple. The front entrance hall opens into a large oak-floored kitchen/breakfastroom, with a livingroom a few steps up.

This opens through French doors into the Travertine-floored family room/diningroom originally described as a “solar space”: it has a glazed roof with timber beams.

A sunroom – described as an orangerie – is a long marble-floored hall that runs from the diningroom to the back of the house: on one side is a wall of windows looking onto the back garden, on the other, French doors opening into each of the three bedrooms.

These can also be accessed from a parallel hall on the other side of the bedrooms.

Dressing room

Cream-painted bedrooms with cream carpets have built-in wardrobes.

The main bedroom has a smart walk-in dressingroom and an en-suite shower room, which, like the family bathroom and guest toilet, has marble floors and mosaic-tiled splashbacks.

Outside, there’s a separate 15sq m (161sq ft) home office/studio with an en-suite shower, which could be used as another bedroom/guest room.

There’s a wide and quite private garden at the side of house. A cedar deck runs the length of the sunroom beside it and a small flagstoned terrace looks over a stream at the back of the property.

There’s room for parking at the front of the house, behind timber gates.

Mill Lane  is a small, easy-to-miss potholed cul-de-sac that’s a sharp right off Shanganagh Road, just past Commons Road, and lies roughly halfway between Ballybrack and Shankill villages.