Spiced up redbrick is a smash hit

A top pop producer is putting his beautifully restored Victorian home on the market with a €2.8m price tag. Bernice Harrison reports

A magnificently restored Victorian house in Dublin, full of calm good taste and astonishing attention to detail, doesn't automatically spring to mind as the home of one of pop music's biggest hitmakers. But the writer/producer behind the Spice Girls and an entire pop chart full of singers has lived in 1 Dartmouth Road in Dublin 6 for the past two years.

Richard "Biff" Stannard and his partner Sean Doyle bought the house knowing that it needed considerable work, but from the start they were determined to bring it back to its former glory - and then some. Their determination paid off last year when the house won the prestigious Opus award for conservation and restoration which acknowledged how architects the Coady Partnership combined best conservation practice with the needs of modern living.

And these guys are very keen on modern living. The back reception room, traditionally the formal diningroom, is now a panelled home cinema with surround sound and a 10 ft wide screen that seems to drop silently out of nowhere. Between that and the plasma screen in the main bedroom there's at least €100,000 of boy toys in the house.

For all that, there's a graciousness that's immediately apparent once inside the bright elegant hall, because all the details have been taken care off, including conservation of the ornate plasterwork, new sash windows throughout, restored floorboards and all the original white marble fireplaces - which were cleaned, repaired and replaced.

It helps that the couple has such good taste. In the magnificent bay-windowed front livingroom the walls, as elsewhere in the house, are covered with paper from Mulberry; the taupe carpets came from Harrods and the deep sofas are Liberty. The room's natural attributes help too - it has high ceilings, excellent proportions and the house looks straight down leafy Leeson Park, giving it an open vista unusual in a Dublin 6 redbrick.

There is another room at hall level, a large study with custom built mahogany bookshelves at the back of the house.

Upstairs there are four bedrooms. The couple have four children who don't live there permanently but spend time there, and two of the girls share a double-sized bedroom to the front of the house.

Biff has decorated the back double bedroom for his mum, with fresh toile and sparkling white paint, as well as a room for his dad - this has a clubby feeling with walls covered in dark burgundy patterned fabric to match the bedspread and curtains.

The bathroom for these bedrooms is the same in style as all the bathrooms in this house, determinedly modern with limestone flooring, mosaic tiles, massive shower system and white Philippe Starck sanitary ware.

The very large main bedroom, also at the front of the house, has the same bay-windowed view down Leeson Park as well as a large en suite. At the top in the back return is a small bathroom with a Jacuzzi.

Downstairs in the basement there are three principal rooms. One is a large home gym, the other a spare room which could be another bedroom or a children's playroom. The kitchen, to the front, combines that same sense of conservation-meets- contemporary that's everywhere in this house: it is custom built-in Victorian country-style with a bright red Aga and a large island unit. There is also an integrated American fridge and a gas hob.

There's a good-sized utility room and beyond it a boiler room whose size and complexity give an idea of just how up-to-the-minute the services in this house are. Needless to say, there's a highly sophisticated alarm system with closed circuit TV.

A sliding wooden gate to the side of the front garden allows parking for two cars while the back garden has been beautifully but simply landscaped with plants chosen by Helen Dillon and a pergola with vines ready to creep up it.

The house, which was designed by Rawson Carroll in 1860, has 353 sq m (3,800 sq ft). 1 Dartmouth Road is for auction on March 31st and Peter Kenny at Jackson-Stops is guiding €2.8 million.