Grail of Avoca Avenue in Blackrock for €3.75m

Greenwood, a detached five-bedroom house with a converted coach house on nearly 0.8 acres on Avoca Avenue in Blackrock, is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald with an asking price of €3.75 million.

The house has been in the same family for 26 years, but the owners are now downsizing from this substantial early Victorian home.

“The house needs a new generation to move in,” says one of the owners. “When we moved in, a family who had been here years moved on.”

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And that’s what is going to happen this time around to the house which is opposite the Avoca Park development of much newer houses on the neighbourhood’s exclusive avenue.

Downsizing is a big decision and it took the owners two years to, as one half of the couple says, “comes to terms with the idea”.

But now that their four grown-up children are long settled in their own lives and the retired couple spend most of their time in either Donegal or Spain, the 360sq m (3,875sq ft) house is far too big for their needs.

It will come as no surprise that Greenwood is a protected structure. It is one of the original houses on the road and is a particularly attractive building with its enclosed porch, black-painted decorative roof trim, tall sash windows and three-sided bow window to the side.

It also feels every inch of its acreage with a vast rear garden, a coach house to one side and a front garden set back from the road that, along with mature planting, has parking space for half a dozen cars.

Different levels

Greenwood is three-storey to the front and three-storey to the back, with rooms to the front and back being of different levels, so there are no grand interconnecting reception rooms – something buyers at this upper level of the market tend to look for.

Instead, there are two smaller rooms on either side of the front hall. On the right, there is a fine drawingroom with that bow window to the side, a tall sash to the front and a fine white marble fireplace. There is a more informal reception room on the other side.

Up a half-flight of stairs, there is the formal diningroom on one side and a large family bathroom on the other in what probably used to be a small parlour room.

Upstairs there are four good-sized, double bedrooms, one en suite, and a small single in the room over the porch. It’s likely that new owners will convert this room into an en suite or dressingroom.

Down at the garden level of this double-fronted house, the front rooms are half-basement level while the rooms to the rear are the same level as the garden.

Modern space

New owners will, most likely, do a great deal of work to the house, modernising and redecorating, just as the family who are leaving did when they moved in.

The entire basement area will be first on the agenda for reworking, not just to get better views of the back garden, but also to create a modern eat-in kitchen. The single-storey extension at the rear – there before the owners’ time and used by them as a playroom – will go.

They won’t be short of examples of what can be done. Greenwood is one of five similar-style Victorian homes built on this stretch of Avoca Avenue, each on vast sites with coach houses and, at the time, uninterupted views of the mountains. Several have now been extended – the back garden and the wide site opening up a variety of possibilites. One, Glenheather, sold for €9.4 million in 2007 and has since been extended.

To the side and separate from Greenwood is the two-storey coach house which was renovated about 10 years ago – “swallows were nesting in it, it hadn’t a roof” says the owner. It has its own courtyard to the front. It shares the driveway with the main house, which probably means it is not suitable for rental but more likely to be used, as it is now, for additional family accommodation.

“It needs a new family,” say the owners, a little regretfully.