Something cooking on Rosmeen

Dún Laoghaire/ €1.1m: The people who lived in Dublin's stately Victorian and Edwardian houses would be astonished if they could see many of them now: all over the capital, period properties are being transformed by renovations which bring a bright Mediterranean feeling to handsome redbricks.

Such a house is number 6 Rosmeen Gardens in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, a five-bedroom semi-detached house built - along with 11 others like it - at the turn of the 20th century. It has a guide of €1.1 million before auction through Douglas Newman Good on July 1st.

Rosmeen Gardens is a cul-de-sac off the main road to Sandycove, Co Dublin, opposite the People's Park and just one street away from Sandycove DART station.

The kitchen/diningroom and back garden are at the heart of the renovation and on a bright June morning, they look attractively Continental. The limestone-floored kitchen opens through two sets of double glazed doors onto a decked patio at the side of the house which has room for a large outdoor table.

The outside dining area is screened from the back garden by a curved whitewashed wall, part of the clever garden design by Mary Reynolds - her last job, say the owners, before she went on to win a gold medal at the Chealsea Flower Show a few years ago.

The quirky garden, which is full of mature plants, features a miniature hill at the side of the small circular lawn - good fun for the children of the owners - and a small wooden seat set into the back wall. The property backs onto Corrig Avenue and you can just see the number 7 bus stop on the far side of the wall.

The mature herb garden at the front of the house is the first clue that one of the owners (the husband) is a serious cook. Architect Daniel O'Sullivan worked with the couple to create a real cook's kitchen which has capacious stainless steel drawers, solid oak worktops, polished granite breakfast bar beside a Gaggenau range with two gas, two electric rings, a large Gaggenau oven set into the wall beside it and "the world's most expensive light fitting" over it. (All the fittings are included in the sale).

Deliberately, there are no overhead cupboards but two large walk-in larders for storage, as well as a separate utility room. A wall was knocked down to make this large kitchen/dining area with a vaulted ceiling over the kitchen; to offset "the railway carriage effect" the main kitchen wall is curved.

The rest of the ground floor accommodation consists of two interconnecting reception rooms which have polished wooden floors and original features like tiled cast-iron fireplaces, anaglypta-covered ceilings, centre roses, and in the front room, a box bay window. There is a guest toilet off the bright limestone-floored entrance hall.

This is a three-storey house, with five bedrooms upstairs - one on the return next to the family bathroom, two more on the first floor, and two on the second floor.

The bedroom on the return is a real boys' room, covered with Action Man and camouflage wallpaper. The main bedroom on the first floor was created by knocking down a wall between two smaller rooms and it has a touch of glamour about it: the bed is on a raised area with floor lighting set into steps up to it, echoed by more lights set into the floor; a curved wall conceals a large dressingroom and an en suite and there is room for a sofa in the box bay window.

The en suite has twin bowl wash-hand basins on an oak plinth and a power shower unit with coloured glass blocks. The owners left the former guest house wash-hand basins in most bedrooms, and there is another en suite off one of two bedrooms at the top of the house.