Smart moves on prime Sutton road as canny buyers go modern

It is sometimes helpful to have neighbours with deep pockets, or at least this was the case for the owners of Ouvane on Sutton’s Greenfield Road, a 1960s house with significant frontage and direct beach access to the rear, which hit the market last year seeking €1.8 million. Two price drops and one year later, it eventually sold to its next door neighbour, developer John McKeon, who purchased it at a much reduced €1.2 million through Clondev Properties, a company associated with his family’s award-winning MKN Property Group.

It should come as little surprise that the purchase of Ouvane is a development play, with the developer planning to demolish the existing property and to replace it with three sleek detached houses – the largest being a 223sq m five-bed, followed by a 191sq m four-bed and a 168sq m three-bed.

McKeon is likely pleased with the price paid, which equates to just over €4 million per acre. When he purchased the site for his own home, Waters Edge, in 2005 the asking price was a substantially higher €8.6 million per acre. He made the most of that site by building an impressive 492sq m modern family home, trading up from a mews house in Ballsbridge which he built some years prior, which emerged on the market in 2008 seeking €1.7 million.

For years McKeon's modern Sutton home has seemed a little out of context amid neighbouring dated houses, however since the rebirth of Dublin's property market in 2013, this stretch of road has turned into something of a mecca for modern architecture.

Investor Celia Scott demolished Seaverge, 12 Greenfield Road, beside McKeon, and built an ultra-modern 293sq m beach house. Scott purchased the house for just €610,000 in 2013 according to the property price register and cannily sold her home, Carnalea, nearby in Howth last year for €5 million. Next door, the Cooper family picked up a two-storey house, Dunmuire, for just €550,000 in 2012 – down from its €1.8 million asking price in 2010 – and demolished it, replacing it with a 210sq m house similar in design to that of Scott's, with both houses designed by PAC Studio architects. When the new MKN houses are built, this will be one of the smartest looking row of houses around, not to mention the spectacular setting. Each of the three new houses will enjoy panoramic sea views, perfect southwesterly orientations and will have direct beach access from their rear gardens.