Number 134 North King Street is a well-maintained brightly decorated three-storey three-bed in a terrace of nine houses right around the corner from Smithfield market in Dublin's North inner city. It is one of three in the terrace currently for sale. Douglas Newman Good, which is handling two of the three homes, is looking for offers of over £115,000 for the property.
Across the road, work is progressing on Smithfield Gate, a Zoe development of apartments on the corner of Red Cow Lane and North King Street. Around the corner, the wide square of cobblestones that is Smithfield proper is still a huge car-park, but that will all change over the next few years when the HARP (Historic Area Rejuvenation Plan) is put into effect.
Number 134 North King Street, a former local authority house built about 10 years ago by Dublin Corporation, has (like the other homes in the terrace) an unusual design, with the livingroom on the second floor. The front door opens into a hall tiled with black ceramic tiles. To the right of the front door is a fully-tiled lavatory, and at the back of the house, a kitchen nicely decorated in shades of green. Upstairs, on the second floor, there is a double bedroom at the front of the house with the livingroom overlooking the rear, and on the third floor, a single and a double bedroom and family bathroom. This house, like all the others, has a small back yard that opens on to Friary Court, a development of corporation houses at the rear.
Number 136 North King Street, two doors away, is for sale through Mason Estates with an asking price of £125,000. This house needs redecoration, but the second-floor livingroom, with a lovely polished floor, shows just how stylish these homes can be.
It still takes some imagination to see Smithfield as it should be in a few years time - "another Temple Bar, only better", says Paul Lappin of Douglas Newman Good. Under Dublin Corporation's ambitious HARP, the whole Smithfield area is being comprehensively redeveloped, with plans that will re-invent this urban village as a vibrant, exciting area that aims to benefit both the local community and the city as a whole. Jim Keogan, project manager of HARP, conjures up exciting images of Smithfield proper as it will be when plans for its redevelopment are implemented. Car-parking will be banished from the square, cobblestones relaid, and 24-metre-high gas-lit masts erected as sculptural pieces. Heritage Properties' innovative scheme on the site of Jameson's old distillery, which extends from Bow Street over to Smithfield, will incorporate a hotel, music centre, bars, restaurants and shops fronting on to the square. It is opposite Duffy's former scrapyard site, recently sold and soon to be redeveloped. Meanwhile, Dublin Corporation is spending £1m restoring the facade of the classic Victorian building that is the fruit and vegetable market. Work on the square is to start in February, 1999.
Meanwhile, in discussions with local residents, the corporation is planning environmental improvements to Friary Court. The signs of the renewal are everywhere, with huge cranes clustered in the skyline, and builders' vehicles joining already heavy traffic thundering down narrow streets. And although the area looks like a huge building site, distinctive developments such as Heritage Properties' Smithfield Village, the apartment complex which includes Whiskey Corner - the Jameson Distillery beautifully redeveloped as a visitor attraction - hint at the style that is to come.
Long-term, this makes Smithfield a very good bet. Prices have, of course, gone up dramatically in recent years, as they have in nearby Stoneybatter, but surprisingly, it still seems to be possible to find properties at semi-reasonable prices - a two-bed house in need of work will cost about £80,000 to £90,000; a larger house, or one nicely refurbished, can go up to £120,000 or so. One-bed apartments, new and secondhand, start around the £90,000 mark, although two-beds in Smithfield Village can cost around £150,000.
There is a plentiful and growing supply of apartments in developments such as The Hardwicke and The Richmond on Brunswick Street, or in just-launched schemes such as Blackhall Square. About 1,000 apartments have been built in the area in the past two years, and another 2,000 will be built over the next four years, says Ken MacDonald, of Hooke & MacDonald.
The 62 apartments in the Smithfield Gate complex, across the road from the three-storey houses on North King Street, are due to come on the market in December or January through Hooke & MacDonald; another 65 will be available in a development near Church Street and Bow Street, and another 58 are being built on a site next door to The Hardwicke development on Brunswick Street, with a spring release date. Meanwhile, Douglas Newman Good is launching a scheme of apartments and townhouses, O'Shea's Court, not far away, off Manor Street in Stoneybatter, this week: prices here will range from £100,000 for one-bed apartments to £150,000 for a two-bed duplex.
Many of the apartments currently being released are Section 23 apartments, which provide tax reliefs that attract investors as well as first-time buyers. (When these incentives end at the end of this year, they may be replaced by new tax reliefs specifically aimed at the socio-economic renewal of the area, to ensure local residents benefit from the gains of physical renewal, says Jim Keogan.)
But, interestingly, there is a third buyer in the Smithfield market competing for properties in the area - barristers working in the nearby courts. Traffic gridlock and the need for parking spaces has sparked off lively demand from legal people living in counties fringing Dublin, according to all the agents. They buy houses and apartments as a town pieda-terre, where they can live for three or four days of the week. And Gerald Jacobs of Mason Estates reports selling one home to two lawyers who just kept the parking space, and rented out the house.
There is not a huge turnover yet in apartments in the area, but there is good value to be found. Number 1 Red Mill, a Zoe apartment development on North Brunswick Street, is a neat and nicely decorated apartment about one and a half years old which hardly looks lived in at all: the large livingroom with buttery yellow walls has a high ceiling with coving, a laminated wooden floor, and a galley kitchen off it.
The public areas of the apartment block are very well maintained, and there is a lovely communal garden in a courtyard outside, as well as rooftop gardens with dramatic views across the city. The apartment, which has a car-parking space, is for sale through Douglas Newman Good, for £89,000. It has an annual maintenance fee of £450.
The attractive aspect of Smithfield is that not only are there many apartments, there is still a distinct sense of community in the area, and pockets of streets with Liberties and Stoneybatter-style turn-of-the-century redbrick/brownbrick houses.
These, however, do not come on the market all that frequently, and are hotly sought after - although local agent Chris Ryan believes that for the moment, prices in the area have stabilised. A redbrick on Church Street opposite Father Matthew Hall sold a few weeks ago four days after the for sale sign went up. The price paid was around £90,000, with perhaps £20,000 more needed to refurbish it. A small redbrick on Lurgan Street, near the corner with North King Street, sold for £80,000. And the owner of a refurbished end-of-terrace three-bed in a quiet cul-de-sac off Linenhall Parade - on the far side of Constitution Hill from Smithfield - is looking for £160,000 for her property. (It is in a Northern-inspired network of streets called Coleraine, Lisburn, and Linenhall.)
But anyone interested in a home in the area will enjoy a walkabout there: in years to come, under HARP, there will be a pedestrian walkway from Henry Street along Mary Street right through to the Smithfield area, making this one of the most attractive parts of inner city Dublin.
