Photographer Richard Beer can make any interior look good – for decades he has photographed Dublin’s top houses for estate agents’ brochures. Now his own home is for sale.
IT’S NOT surprising that when Richard Beer went looking for a house he found one with enormous character and architectural interest. Beer is a photographer who specialises in photographing interiors and architecture – over the years many auctioneers have used his services when putting together sales brochures for the best houses on the market.
He can make a house look its best, though a simply job could take time as he insisted on revisiting properties in morning, afternoon or evening to get just the right light.
Now he has put his own home on the market, a large, quirky redbrick called Kensington Lodge in Rathmines. It’s for sale at €1.5 million through Finnegan Menton.
Thirty years ago when he and his wife were househunting they came across one of the most unusual houses they’d ever seen at 107 Grove Park, which connects Rathmines Road with Grove Road.
The highly decorative, detached house, which has 279sq m (3,003sq ft) of space, was designed by English architect William Isaac Chambers in the early 1880s.
He spent a decade working in Ireland, becoming well known for his innovative use of decorative terracotta tiles, and he designed Kensington Lodge as his family home so it is something of an ambitious showcase for his work.
Chambers was influenced by the then-fashionable Queen Anne style and this house was built over three storeys with highly decorative interior and exterior flourishes from the heavy swag over the front door and the baroque female herms on either side of the main upstairs window to the elaborate stucco work in the gracious livingroom.
Other original features include several elaborate coloured glass windows, including the wheel window but at attic level at the front. It’s very much one of kind.
Thirty years ago the house was divided into flats and over the years the Beers have turned it into a comfortable house for a growing family, restoring as much as possible and replacing missing details with hard-found architectural salvage.
At hall level there are two rooms, one very grand livingroom to the front, with high ceilings, a period fireplace and elaborate cornice work and a smaller room to the back.
As in most rooms in this detached house, they enjoy light from two directions.
Upstairs there are three bedrooms, two doubles and a single as well as a family shower room.
On up further, the attic with its wood panelled ceiling, is accessed by a modern spiral staircase and this is also used as a large, atmospheric bedroom.
Down in the basement, the family opened up the space, knocking three rooms together to create a very large eat-in kitchen with contemporary units topped with granite as well as an Aga. Off this is a family room, with wood-burning stove which opens out via custom-made concertina doors to the garden which is at the side of the house. It’s surprisingly large and private and includes off-street car-parking. There’s also another shower room at this level and a utility room.
The house, which is decorated in a restrained period style, including William Morris wallpaper and dark paintwork, is as quirky, dramatic and interesting inside as it is out.
