starter Homes

Number 28 Ave Maria Avenue, Marylands, Dublin 8, is an excellent example of how a clever conversion can turn a small former local authority cottage into a bright, reasonably good-sized, modern home. Located in a self-contained Dublin Corporation-built estate known as Marylands, off Cork Street not far from Dolphin's Barn, it is for sale for £90,000-plus through Douglas Newman Good.

Bought about four years ago for about £30,000 to £40,000, this one/two-bed house has been extensively refurbished. The front door opens into a tiled hall. The main bedroom, a reasonably-sized double, opens off it to the left, while the main living space - a good-sized high-ceilinged livingroom-cum-kitchen/breakfastroom - lies straight ahead.

Everything has been done to let light into the house, and on a bright November day, sun streamed through the large back door and window into the kitchen, and the livingroom beyond. There are also Velux windows in the roof to maximise the light.

Original features - like a handsome black cast-iron fireplace with turquoise tiles inset - have been retained and restored. There is ceiling coving in all the rooms, with walls painted light creams or white or pale yellow. The windows are all double glazed timber.

There is a handsome fully-tiled shower room downstairs, and a very good attic conversion upstairs, which is currently used as a bedroom and study. A long room, it has two roof windows and a cleverly designed wardrobe under the eaves - a metal rail has been bolted to the walls to make a simple, effective clothes rail.

At the back, there is a good square garden. The walls have been restored and plastered, but it now needs landscaping. It is private and sheltered, with mature trees in neighbouring gardens providing a splash of green in what could otherwise be a concrete, urban setting.

Number 28 Ave Maria Avenue is one of only a handful of former cottages in Marylands. Most of the houses here are two-storey two-bed houses, like 27 Lourdes Road, which provides a perfect counterpoint to the house at Ave Maria Avenue.

This house is in virtually original condition, to such a degree that a film company could use it as a set in a 1930s movie. The house is being sold through Mason Estates for around £70,000.

Although obviously whoever buys it will have to spend a lot of money modernising the house, it is interesting to see how well-built these homes originally were, with attractive details, such as the picture rails in the main front room and the small centrepieces around the lights. The livingroom opens straight into what would have been the scullery, which still has its original, small but now chic Belfast sink. The only bathroom in the house is the lavatory off the scullery. Upstairs, there are two reasonably-sized double bedrooms at front and rear: with their lino-covered floors, iron bedsteads, old-fashioned dressing tables and huge pictures of the Sacred Heart and a raft of other pictures dating from the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, they vividly conjure up images of the house as it must have been when the original owners moved in.

There is an overgrown but good-sized garden at the rear which would accommodate an extension to the house, while still leaving enough room for the garden.

Marylands is a small, neat, estate of 219 mostly former local authority houses built by Dublin Corporation in two phases between 1930 and 1932. (The first phase of 90 houses cost a total of just under £36,000 to build.) Originally called the Marrowbone Lane Area Scheme, it was termed Marylands by the corporation in 1932, the year the Eucharistic Congress took place in Dublin. But the corporation's housing committee had chosen the Marian street names - Ave Maria, Lourdes, Loreto, Morningstar, Our Lady's and Rosary avenues and roads - to reflect the proximity of the scheme to Marrowbone Lane, a corruption of its original medieval name, St Mary-la-Bonne. According to the corporation's archives department, the religious theme may also have been influenced by the Eucharistic Congress. (Presumably, the Marian theme influenced the naming of nearby Fatima Mansions as well.) Marylands is located off the junction of Cork Street and Marrowbone Lane, a short distance from Dolphin's Barn and not much further from The Liberties. And increasingly, young singles and couples hunting for that affordable house in striking distance of the city centre are buying houses here. The prices in Marylands range from the late £50,000s for a small cottage in need of complete renovation, up to the mid£90,000s for a two-storey, two-bed or three-bed that has been refurbished. Compared with many other areas near Dublin's city centre, these are competitive prices. Former local authority houses in Crumlin and Drimnagh, for example, can command up to £110,000 (for a three-bed in good condition), while smaller refurbished cottages in The Liberties can cost around £90,000. In general, house prices in Marylands are about £10,000 less than in such areas.

One of the factors keeping prices in Marylands down is its location, close to Fatima Mansions, the large corporation housing estate where drugs are still a problem, despite strenuous efforts by the local community to tackle it.

But agents maintain that Marylands is an enclave, and relatively secure, with a strong Neighbourhood Watch committee keeping an eye on what goes on in the estate. A builder working on a house in Ave Maria Avenue reckoned this was true - he said he'd been working there for three weeks and hadn't seen any trouble.

And as I pored over a map on another street, an elderly woman came out of her house in the rain to help me find where I was going, with a "Sure, what are we here only to help each other?" as I thanked her, justifying the area's reputation as a friendly, close-knit community.

WHEREAS six months ago, there were very few houses for sale in Marylands, quite a number seem to have come on the market all of a sudden - possibly because of the strong prices being made. Colman O'Connor of O'Connor Shannon believes another factor is that people who bought the houses as an investment 10 or so years ago are now selling them, both because of good prices and before a possible increase in capital gains taxes. (Rents for houses would be in the £500 to £600 a month range.) Whatever the reason, this seems to be a good time for first-time buyers to look for houses here, as investors who might have been competing for properties in the area have pretty much disappeared since the recommendations of the Bacon report were implemented.

The profile of this estate is becoming like that in other inner city communities such as Stoneybatter and East Wall - a mixture mainly of elderly original residents, some of their children with their families, and young professionals, singles and couples.

Although most of the houses date from the same period, built to the fairly standard corporation design, many individual owners have put their own stamp on the houses, and there is obviously a lot of renovation going on. Many homes have new leaded windows, extensions, and neat front gardens. And most of the houses seem to have reasonably-sized back gardens, compared, say, with Stoneybatter and The Liberties, where extensions usually take up most of whatever garden there is. The nearest shops are on Cork Street, towards the junction of Dolphin's Barn and South Circular Road, a short walk away. And of course Dublin city centre is very near, with the buses along Cork Street taking only minutes to get there outside rush hour.