With a lively village centre, good shops and schools and a wide selection of property within its boundaries, Blackrock is one of the most highly prized suburbs along the southern DART line. Million pound houses are plentiful here and £500,000 is not unusual for a post-war semi on a good road. Demand always outstrips supply - some of the best schools and the most popular shopping centres are in the village and the sea is a big attraction.
It is not immediately noticeable that Blackrock is a coastal location, however. Apart from Maretimo Gardens and Idrone Terrace (a fine row of period houses built by Dr Henry Kavanagh) the town seems to have turned its back on the sea. This wasn't always so. Blackrock was the "Brittas Bay" of the 18th and 19th centuries and city folk crowded to their favourite watering hole on fine weekends.
The Three Tun Tavern and The Sign of the Ship did a roaring trade and there was a melon festival every year at Conway's Tavern. The cross at the top of the village is thought to date from medieval times when the Lord Mayor of Dublin would ride as far as the cross to mark the limit of his jurisdiction.
Long-term residents will remember the baths down by the DART station, now locked and falling into disrepair. Families could buy a season ticket for 30 shillings and all the south Dublin swimming clubs raced in the 50 m pool on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The baths site is now causing concern among residents who would like it to be restored for local use. However, Johnny Ronan's Treasury Holdings now owns the freehold of the baths, although the county council retain a 120 year lease on the property dating from 1929.
According to council spokesman Eamonn O'Hare, it is an objective of the regional plan to redevelop the site. "We have had a number of people looking at the baths and the land and haven't come to a policy decision yet, but it will be something relating to its location as a maritime site," says Mr O'Hare. Another architectural gem fallen on hard times is the Town Hall, which lost its municipal significance when Blackrock came under the jurisdiction of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. The 19th-century building currently houses the Carnegie Library and a faculty of Dun Laoghaire Senior College. Blackrock Chamber of Commerce is anxious to retain the fine auditorium as a public meeting place.
The growing number of offices relocating from the city (20 computer-related companies so far) is adding to the volume of house-hunters in the area. In the first viewing last week of a Fairy Hill bungalow guiding £380,000, 120 families turned up. In the same area, a five-bed detached house on Granville Park, with a guide of £600,000, had 85 viewers on the first day.
The office blocks arrived on the coat-tails of the new bypass. This was built in the early 1980s amid local controversy over the annexation of historic Frascati House and grounds and its subsequent demolition to build the current Frascati shopping centre. The Irish revolutionary hero Lord Edward Fitzgerald spent most of his childhood years here and the mansion was an important meeting place of the United Irishmen.
The Blackrock postal address covers a large area stretching from Booterstown to Monkstown and westward towards Mount Merrion, Stillorgan and Dean's Grange. First-time buyers will be lucky to find an affordable ex-local authority house within these boundaries. Breslin & Company recently sold a three-bedroom ex-local authority bungalow on St Vincent's Park off Temple Hill for £220,000 and Terry Halpenny has a three-bed end of terrace house at Rockford Park on his books for £175,000.
Cottages are scarce and in high demand. Hamilton Osborne King has just sold a two-bedroom cottage on Stradbrook Road for £250,000 to a buyer who offered £15,000 more than the asking price on the first viewing. Brusna Cottages, right in the village, rarely change hands. When they do, they can make well over £100,000 in poor condition.
Douglas Newman Good currently has two of the Annaville Avenue cottages (needing a little work) off Newtownpark Avenue for sale. The asking price for both is around £190,000.
Blackrock is best known for its wide sweeping avenues running to Stillorgan Road which contain some of the most elegant houses in the area. Cross Avenue, Mount Merrion Avenue, Carysfort Avenue and Avoca Avenue form the "stockbroker belt" of Blackrock. Some of the period mansions once located on these roads, such as Carysfort Lodge, Linden and Talbot Lodge, have been demolished to make way for new housing developments. Carysfort Park is now UCD's Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business. Blackrock College stands on the site of three fine houses. Mount Merrion Avenue was at one time the entrance to the Fitzwilliam family's estate and once had pillars at its Blackrock end. Though the avenue is a busy artery for traffic, houses here have risen sharply in value in the last five years. HOK recently sold one of the terraced two-storey over garden level period houses at the Blackrock end for £725,000.
Prices are higher on the avenues leading off Mount Merrion Avenue, such as Sydney Avenue, Waltham Terrace - where a Regency style house sold 14 months ago for just under £900,000 - and South Hill Avenue, where a gothic-style semidetached house recently changed hands for around £2.5 million. Prices on Prince Edward Terrace on Carysfort Avenue - an elegant terrace of Victorian stucco-fronted houses - are climbing towards £1 million. Down by the sea, and beside the DART station, Idrone Terrace's tall two-storey over basement houses overlooking the sea also fetch premium prices when they do come on the market. One of its houses in poor condition sold 18 months ago for around £500,000. Avoca Avenue is top of the league, with a limited number of detached period houses on large gardens. These properties rarely come on the open market and some are now valued at £2 to £3 million.
The modern houses in the Avoca Park development off Avoca Avenue, built by Castlethorn in the early 1990s, are increasingly popular. A four-bedroom house in the development sold for £500,000 last June, an increase of £80,000 on an identical property sold the previous year. Nearby, Douglas Newman Good is selling a modern four-bedroom detached house at Talbot Lodge for £485,000.
Estates off Carysfort Avenue are also achieving impressive prices. The Phillips Partnership has just agreed the sale of a 1940s five-bedroom semi in this area for just short of £900,000. Gunne recently sold a modern four-bed detached house on the Carysfort Downs scheme for "between £450,000 and £500,000". There is a good selection of apartments around the village. Among the most popular are Carysfort Hall, Castle Dawson on the Rock Road and Clonfadda Wood and The Elms on Mount Merrion Avenue. A two-bedroom ground-floor apartment at Castle Dawson built in the grounds of Sion Hill school has an asking price of £275,000.
