Oasis in the heart of Portobello

Bloomfield Avenue is off South Circular Road in the trendy Portobello district of Dublin 8. The current owners of number 28, Brian and Marie Hogan, purchased the 186sq m house 25 years ago when the property was in a more sorry state.

"They had just painted over the dry rot, but you could smell it everywhere," says Brian Hogan, an award-winning architect. "So we engaged the late Paddy Quigley, who was an expert in that field, to fix the problem."

The couple met in the Middle East in the 1950s, when Brian was designing the first schools in Kuwait. Marie, whose father was an oil engineer based in Bahrain, remembers her father and his colleagues living in tents under the blistering sun until the first houses were built to accommodate oil workers.

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On returning to Ireland, Brian established his practice Tyndall Hogan. In 1989 they decided to downsize and purchased the house on Bloomfield Avenue.

Conservatory The couple added an extension to the rear to accommodate an office and a conservatory, in which

orchids and aloe vera now thrive in the morning sun.

The property retains all its original features and the couple reinstated the piano nobile on the first floor, a gracious reception room overlooking the tree-lined avenue.

Downstairs, the original interconnecting drawingroom and diningroom, are now a diningroom and family kitchen, while there is also an informal livingroom lies to the rear.

Magical

What will really attract buyers are the magical rear gardens. Number 28 is the only house on the eastern side of the avenue to have retained its 100ft long garden.

Set out in three different segments – a courtyard garden, private dining area and raised sundeck – the gardens feature mature camellias, peony roses and clematis which provide year-round colour.

The house has two rooms currently used as bedrooms, but the office overlooking the garden and the gracious reception room upstairs would work as bedrooms too.

Number 28, which is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald for €995,000, is a fine family home with the added bonus of an urban oasis.