NEW TO THE MARKET:Developers would once have fought over a 218-acre property nine miles from Dublin city centre. The auction of Allenswood next month will test the market, writes
JACK FAGAN
THE BACK road between Clonee and Lucan in west Dublin still has a handful of elegant stud farms with large period houses, mature woodlands and rich farmland.
Allenswood House, an early 19th century house close to Lucan with a customary stableyard on 218 acres, is no longer used as a stud farm but it has all the traditional charm and style of an earlier era.
Allenwood was the home for many years of Sir John Prichard Jones, a keen huntsman and horsebreeder, who died two years ago at the age of 93. His wife, Lady Helen, passed away earlier this year and the estate is now to be offered for sale at auction on October 7th.
The joint selling agents, McDonald Brothers Real Estate Alliance and Savills, are not providing a guide price for interested parties but, even in the present difficult property market, it is thought that the estate should make somewhere between €7 million and €10 million.
Those figures may well be on the low side if the sale attracts the attention of cash-rich investors prepared to buy the land and sit on it for a few years in the expectation that, as it is only about two miles from Lucan and nine miles from the city centre, it will eventually be rezoned for housing.
Then again the Green Party’s demand for an 80 per cent windfall tax on the enhanced value of land once it has been rezoned may well take any speculators out of the picture.
Like some of the other big estates in the area, Allenswood House stands at the end of a long wooded avenue with views over rich green fields towards the Dublin mountains. The three-bay house has a mixture of formality and elegance but most of the rooms are in need of upgrading and redecoration. It has an impressive 557sq m (6,000sq ft) of floor space including three wonderful reception rooms, two of them with Adam-style fireplaces. Merely listing rooms and dimensions does not give a true impression of the space and light and elegance of this house. There is a huge double conservatory wrapped around one side running from the drawingroom to the kitchen and catching the sun for most of the day.
On the opposite side there is an even more impressive wood-panelled library with a large bay window and a door leading directly into the old rose garden. The kitchen has the customary oil-fired Aga and an old style scullery and larder off it. Overhead there are staff quarters.
Back in the main entrance hall there is a fine stairs leading up to the large first floor landing off which there are five bedrooms, one of them with an en suite, along with the main bathroom. All the bedrooms have clear views over the fields in rich green pastures and corn as it is finally harvested.
