FIONA HEALY is one of the savviest speculators in town and it's good to see her pulling off another spectacular sale in Dublin 4.
She has just offloaded her very large house on Elgin Road for around €12.5 million, a record for the road. The sale was a private deal brokered by Sherry Fitz's Simon Ensor who now works almost exclusively under the radar for Ireland's high net worth individuals.
Not bad considering that she bought the house just four years ago for €4.8 million and is walking away with a valuable double mews site at the end of the garden.
The young mother, who is married to a medic, has been doing up houses since the 1990s and knows exactly what to do with a big redbrick house.
When she purchased Elgin Road it was a big lumbering house that had been bought as an investment by the Guinness family who intended to rent it out to an embassy. They had renovated the house at great expense, and barely broke even when they decided to sell after just a year.
Healy moved in and started all over again, restoring the big reception rooms and adding a new extension to the already enormous semi. The scheme worked and Healy is now ready to move onto the mews site where she has planning permission to build a 278sq m (3,000sq ft) mews. Meanwhile she also has a house on Ailesbury Road to work on. Nice work if you can do it.
