€30m for company houses in D4

A company HQ on Wellington Road includes several houses that are likely to be converted back to family homes, writes Orna Mulcahy, Property Editor.

You could say that houses in Ballsbridge are like buses; you wait for ages for the right one to come along, and then lots of them arrive at once. Such is the case on Wellington Road where a portfolio of Georgian houses and mews buildings has come on the market through Colliers Jackson-Stops with an estimated value of around €30 million.

The property is owned by Arup, the international engineering group which has offices worldwide. Its Irish offices have been at Wellington Road for over 40 years, where 280 staff are housed, working on a huge variety of projects from the M50 to Sean Dunne's Jurys site.

The company will move later in the year to a brand new six-storey HQ which it has acquired in the south docklands.

The core property is a row of three houses - numbers 8, 10 and 12 Wellington Road which are being sold in one lot with their corresponding gardens and mews houses fronting on to the fashionable Raglan Lane.

Together these have an estimated value of around €18 million to €20 million, according to Peter Kenny, who is handling the portfolio sale. The houses are likely to be bought by a cash-rich individual looking for a rock solid investment in Dublin 4, possibly as a family trust. Many of the road's houses have been bought in recent years by wealthy parents for their children.

The buyer will almost certainly split up the houses and revert them to family use, possibly using two of the buildings as a lateral conversion to make one trophy home.

The portfolio also includes a single terraced house further along Wellington Road, number 30, as well as two adjoining mews houses on Pembroke Lane with tremendous development potential.

Number 30 Wellington Road is vacant, though it had previously been used for offices. It has an AMV of €4 million prior to auction on March 21st. The final lot, adjoining mews houses at 6/8 Pembroke Lane, will be sold at auction on March 22nd. The two properties could be cleared to make way for a more ambitious scheme, subject to the necessary planning permission. The site backs onto the gardens of large houses on Elgin Road that have lain empty for many years, with pigeons the only tenants.

Wellington Road is probably the most sought-after address in that part of Ballsbridge that considers itself very central.

While seriously wealthy individuals opt for the sedate suburban stretches of Shrewsbury and Ailesbury, Wellington attracts a more urbane crowd who don't want to stray too far from the Dáil, the Unicorn and the Shelbourne Hotel.

Wellington is also one of the most attractive roads in the city, its fine terraced houses gazing at each other across a wide expanse of road where the traffic is usually fairly civilised. Its houses attract the upwardly mobile from the densely packed roads of Donnybrook and Ranelagh, as well as jaded commuters from Killiney and Dalkey.

Arup's houses are in excellent structural order as one might hope from one of the word's best engineering firms. However, new owners will have to have a large budget to convert them.

The buyer may well be a neighbour, as there are some heavy hitting property investors with both homes and offices nearby.