Fully booked bedrooms on Templeogue Road

At 83 years old, number 239 Templeogue Road has all of the finer features and advantages of its age. Ceilings are high, there’s a good sense of space, it has bay and wraparound windows, and the gardens, front and rear, are wider, longer and lusher than gardens on most younger houses. The vendor’s family lived there for 47 years and he is only the fourth owner. It was, he says, “a great family house in what is a good place to grow up”.

Agent Sherry FitzGerald is asking €895,000 for what is an executor's sale. The 197sq m (2,120sq ft) floor area is divided between five bedrooms, three reception rooms and a kitchen.

A remarkable feature in four of the five bedrooms is the dramatic and unique use of books as decor. A front bedroom, with two windows and a balcony shared with another front bedroom, has three walls lined, floor to ceiling, with books. “Books are an ongoing passion,” the vendor admits, “even when I was growing up. TV bores me. They also keep the room warm.”

ExpandAutoplay

Image 1 of 9

A second bedroom is currently and literally a book-lined office. The vendor has no idea how many books there are between this and the other bedrooms; “there were more before I had a tidy up. There’s everything except romance. Can’t stand romance.” The main, rear-facing bedroom, in use as a store room and free of books, has a good bay window and picture rail.

Potential

Front and side entrances are in use and there is a guest toilet and shower room on the ground floor and further toilet and separate shower room on the first floor.

No 239 needs modernising. A new owner will want to remodel the old-style kitchen for which the garage, to the side of the house and accessed from the kitchen, might offer development potential.

The formal reception rooms run the length of the ground floor with a bay window to the front and a stone fireplace. A rear TV room has wraparound windows and fireplace with original mahogany surround. The sheltered 88ft-long rear garden has three thriving apple trees, a good lawn and high evergreens and bushes all around.

Forty-seven years have seen a lot of change in the area. When the family arrived in 1969, “there were fields with cows nearby, hockey pitches where there are now apartments and a golf course”. Infrastructure and building have changed the local Templeogue landscape and given it schools, sports facilities and Bushy Park, the latter just across the road from number 239.