Detached Shrewsbury home hits €5.5m

A house bought on this smart D4 road in the 1970s for €18,000 is on the market for €5.5m, a sharp drop from boom times, writes BERNICE HARRISON

PRICES ON Shrewsbury Road have shifted again, but at least there’s movement on Dublin 4’s most desirable road. Earlier this year when Derek Quinlan’s plush house Derrymore sold, the entry level on one of Dublin’s most exclusive roads dropped to around €7 million – signalling that the days of double figures for this exclusive road are long past.

Derrymore is a semi-D and recently its neighbour sold quietly, off market, for a sum believed to be in the region of €5.5 million.

Now another house on Shrewsbury has come on the market: Coolbeg, 14 Shrewsbury Road is a particularly fine, detached house in a commanding position half way down the road, and it’s for sale with Sherry FitzGerald for €5.5 million.

It’s the home of well-known cardiologist Sean Blake and his wife Frances and they have the distinction of being the road’s longest residents.

They bought it 46 years ago when they returned from England, where Sean had been working. They were renting nearby when number 14 came up for auction. Frances bid a little over €18,000 – a strong price at the time – and the house became a home for their growing family.

Back then there were seven medics living on the road and 73 children – a very different atmosphere to the boom when developers snapped up properties for speculation and tall electric gates became the norm, to protect newly refurbished trophy mansions.

The three-storey distinctively Edwardian redbrick measures around 370sq m (4,000sq ft) and the Blakes refurbished and extended it in the 1970s, installing a swimming pool and adding a large formal dining room.

They laid it out as a fourbedroom house – all large doubles. There are two charming bedrooms at the top of the house at attic level and two on the storey below.

They turned one of the bedrooms into a large en suite bathroom for the main bedroom and two of the other bedrooms also have en suites.

At hall level, it’s a house designed for entertaining.

The two fine and gracious interconnecting reception rooms open into the formal dining room which in turn opens out, through two sets of double doors, into the back garden.

These rooms are lovely, featuring beautifully decorative white marble fireplaces (one apparently rescued by previous owners from a house on Mountjoy Square) and, like nearly all rooms at all levels, have duel aspect windows, so feel bright and airy.

On the other side of the hall – there’s also a small entrance porch – is the study, a cosy room with a fireplace, window seat and windows looking out to the side and the front. The kitchen and a separate breakfast room are at the back.

New owners could rework this space, making it more open plan and installing an up-to-date kitchen and giving better access to the garden. The bathrooms also need an update. The two-storey stone coach house in the back garden has a one-bedroom apartment.