Sandymount: € 1.9m A refurbished house overlooking a good-sized green has a garden from another era. Rose Doyle reports
Claremont Park, just a few hundred yards from Sandymount Green, Dublin 4, is a quiet semi-circular enclave of houses built in 1956 overlooking a good-sized green dotted with tall, nicely maturing trees.
The houses are quintessentially of their time - solid, good-sized and comfortable. Number 18 Claremont Park is all of the above and more, having been considerably extended and redesigned.
Douglas Newman Good is quoting a guide of €1.9 million in advance of the November 10th auction for the good-sized 200sq m (2,150sq ft) house which has four-bedrooms, three reception rooms and a study. It could well sell for more: in April this year, 14 Claremont Park, a similar refurbished four-bed semi, made €2.62 million at auction.
The Claremont Park houses are testimony to an era when new houses came with gardens several times bigger than anything you would get today. The rear garden of number 18 is a large, luxuriously landscaped delight and definitely one of its strong points.
In the redesign of the layout of the house, once interconnecting reception rooms have been opened into one long room running from the front to the rear. The long reception room has a floor of French oak, Dado rail, cast-iron fireplace and, making the most of the garden, rear patio doors. The kitchen has been extended to the rear and side, incorporating what was once the garage.
The front part of the garage has been turned into a convenient-sized study. Hardwood floors everywhere, except on the landing and stairs, create a mellow feeling. The family living area is concentrated in the open-plan extension where there is a fully fitted kitchen, TV/den area, breakfastroom and pleasant sunroom with a pitched, wood-panelled ceiling. This room overlooks the garden and has double glass doors leading to steps to the Indian sandstone paved patio.
A wall of apparent storage cupboards between the kitchen and sunroom is in fact a cleverly integrated utility space with all of the necessary appliances hidden behind doors.
A leaded, coloured glass window lights up the the stairs. Two of the bedrooms are to the front, two to the rear; the main bedroom at the front is en suite.They all have built-in wardrobes. The front garden has a sweep of tarmacadam large enough to park a couple of cars.
