MALAHIDE €1.5M:A Victorian redbrick near the centre of Malahide village has most of its original features intact, writes ROSE DOYLE
REDBRICK, ivy clad and with swathes of handsome, old-style garden to the front and back, number 5 Carlisle Terrace, Malahide, Co Dublin has a sense of well-lived history about it. Appearances, in this instance, are entirely accurate.
The eight impressive, semi-detached houses that make up Carlisle Terrace are part of Malahide’s Church Road, just feet from the village centre and classically Victorian in style. Built around 1859, the word locally is that they were intended for Irish officers who’d fought with the British Army in the Crimean War.
Alice and Joseph Cassidy, a civil servant and his teacher wife, bought number 5 in 1930 and generations of the family have lived there happily in the years since. “It was a house full of life,” Merlyn Cassidy assures, “there always seemed to be people running through it. And the gardens! The whole year was spent getting them ready for the annual flower show.”
A good-sized 205.5sq m (2,214.41sq ft), the house is on two levels and has four bedrooms, two reception rooms, a kitchen, conservatory and breakfastroom. The original coal shed and pantry, as well as a utility area and tiny maid’s room, are warren-like off the kitchen to the rear. The 150ft-long rear garden, stocked with old time favourites like hydrangea, rose bushes and evergreens, is a well cared for delight, the large front garden equally well planted.
On the market through Sherry FitzGerald, the sale is by private treaty and the asking price €1.5 million.
A bright house, with high ceilings and long windows, Merlyn Cassidy says “virtually nothing has been changed except for the addition of the breakfastroom in 1900, and cupboards and fittings to the kitchen about 25 years ago.”
A new owner will undoubtedly modernise, notably the kitchen area and bathroom. Features like sash windows, fireplaces, coving, doors, banisters and quarry tiling are all intact.
Both the sitting and diningrooms, on either side of the entrance hallway, have cast-iron fireplaces and picture rails; the diningroom fireplace has intricate inset tiles and a working servant bell in the wall beside it.
The piano on which Alice Cassidy taught a very young Roger Doyle (the composer and her neighbour’s child from number 4) sits in a corner. A rear window overlooking the small conservatory brightens the sittingroom. The quarry-tiled flooring to the rear of the house gives warmth to the small breakfastroom, where you view the garden from a window seat. The atmospheric, other-worldly kitchen has an extra-high ceiling, a pulley-operated clothes line, a wall-panel of servants’ bells and an Aga.
The Cassidy grocery accounts for Christmas 1949 show that M. Wright, New Street, Malahide was paid 6d for two herrings, £3.19s.0d for a turkey, 3/8d for sprouts and 5/- for a bottle of whiskey.
The main, first floor bedroom has a fireplace and built-in wardrobes. Two of the other bedrooms are doubles, the fourth a single. All four have tree-top and Malahide roof views. There is a family bathroom on this level too and a handsome arch over the landing.
5 Carlisle Terrace, Church Road, Malahide, Co Dublin
Four-bed Victorian redbrick with large garden
Agent: Sherry FitzGerald
