Listed period nursing home sells for more than €3m

A former nursing home in Dublin 6, with frontage to both Leeson Park and Upper Leeson Street, has just been sold for more than double its asking price.

Selling agent Lisney put the Molyneux Asylum for Blind Females on the market late last year for €1.5 million. It confirmed this week that an Irish investor, represented by Browne Corrigan, had agreed to pay more than €3 million for the listed building.

The purchaser is likely to apply for planning permission to convert the listed period nursing home into a high-end scheme of eight or nine apartments. The buyer may also seek the green light from the council for a detached house facing Leeson Park and additional residential units on the site of 0.74 of an acre.

The Molyneux Asylum, whose last resident left in 2012, is zoned Z2 – “to protect and/or improve the amenities of residential conservation areas” – under the Dublin City Development Plan 2011-2017. It is a substantial granite-faced, three- storey building of 1,105sq m (11,900sq ft), with an internal lift servicing all floors.

As a nursing home, it accommodated 25 patients. Its current layout contains a variety of different sized rooms, some of them very large.

The sale also included a rear enclosed courtyard with a caretaker’s bungalow, built in the 1970s, and plenty of car-parking.

The location of the Molyneux home, in one of Dublin's most sought-after residential and commercial areas within 1km of St Stephen's Green and Grafton Street, was undoubtedly one its key selling points. It is sandwiched between Christ Church, which is let to the Romanian Orthodox Church, and the Methodist Centenary Church. There are shops and restaurants nearby on Upper Leeson Street.

Opened in 1815

The Molyneux Asylum for Blind Females first opened in 1815 in Peter Street, Dublin 8, in what was formerly the residence of

Thomas Molyneux

(1641-1733), whose sister-in-law,

Lucy Domville

, had been blind.

This building was demolished in the 1940s, though the asylum itself was relocated to new purpose-built premises in Leeson Park in 1864.

The new building, along with the adjoining Christ Church, was designed by James Rawson Carroll and built between 1860 and 1864.

Carroll’s attention to detail is particularly evident in the Molyneux Home.

According to his obituary in the Irish Builder, Carroll was a "kindly, upright, courteous gentleman" whose "clients were in a real sense his friends, no trouble was too great for him to take; indeed, his attention to detail was extraordinary, and therein lay the secret of much of his success."