Starter Homes

Number 32 Phoenix Street, off Sarsfield Road, Dublin 10, is a mid-terrace two-storey redbrick home with unexpected features in The Ranch, Inchicore. Douglas Newman Good, the agents handling the sale, waxes lyrical in its brochure: "Relax in the Jacuzzi or soak up the sun in the roof garden of this beautiful mid-terrace house." It is looking for a price in the late £80,000s.

Indeed, the house does have a standard bath with Jacuzzi, and a roof patio on the top of the downstairs extension, accessed from one of the two upstairs bedrooms: the owner has railed it off, installed a garden bench, even a small Barna shed, giving the property one of the few "gardens" in the neighbourhood.

In general, Number 32 has been very attractively refurbished and extended. The front door opens directly into the main room, which has stained timber floors and a timber fireplace and good high ceilings. This in turn opens into a neat and good-sized kitchen, with granite-effect counter tops, which has space for a breakfast counter. Off this is a small utility area, and the bathroom, which apart from that Jacuzzi, has attractive timber panelling. A handsome, new, polished timber staircase - bounded by wrought-iron banisters - leads to the two bedrooms, one a small double at the front; the other, opens on to that roof garden.

The Ranch is a small, quiet enclave of terraced redbrick turn-of-the century houses on the border of Inchicore and Ballyfermot, tucked away off Sarsfield Road. (Its postal address is Dublin 10, which is usually Ballyfermot, but it is classed as being in Inchicore, which is normally Dublin 8.) And all of a sudden, it seems to have become very popular: no less than 10 of the perhaps 150 or so houses on its four streets are for sale.

Prices for the one-bedroom cottages and two-storey houses range from around £60,000 up to the late £90,000s, depending on condition. The prices are not cheap, as most of the houses have no gardens at either front or back, and the cottages are as small as they come - they're around the 300 sq ft-plus mark, depending on extensions. Most have been extended into the small back yards, leaving space at the back only for the bins, or a bike - and some open directly into the laneways which run behind the houses.

But redbrick houses and cottages like these are hugely popular, and now that homes at the city end of South Circular Road have rocketed in price way beyond the pockets of most first-time buyers, the hunt is on for affordable artisan homes. Compared with Stoneybatter or The Liberties, the houses in The Ranch are competitively priced. And although it would be a longish walk into the city, it takes only five minutes (outside rush hour) by car to get, say, to Heuston station, only 10 or 15 minutes to the city centre, depending on traffic along the quays. There is a pretty good bus service, the 78, into town. And the new Liffey Valley Shopping Centre is only a 15-minute-drive away. The prices are roughly similar or cheaper than prices for new apartments in Inchicore, which cost around £90,000 for one-beds. And of course, the houses have the kind of character that appeals to a particular kind of buyer who prefers a house with a bit of history over a modern apartment.

Both investors and first-time buyers discovered The Ranch some time ago, as the hunt for affordable redbricks moved along the South Circular Road right down to its end in Kilmainham, and kept going into Inchicore. Prices in The Ranch have risen as investors and first-time buyers discovered its hidden attractions. (Rents are around the £400 to £500 a month mark.)

No-one seems to know exactly how the small neighbourhood came to be called The Ranch: it's not a nickname for a part of Dublin that some people think of as cowboy country, but its official moniker - the Ordnance Survey map designates it The Ranch, giving the name an official stamp of approval.

Bill Fleming, who was born and reared there in a terrace of houses at the front of The Ranch that were demolished years ago, has a probable explanation: the houses were originally built around the perimeter of a green space about the size of a soccer pitch, giving the area more or less the shape of a ranch.

The green space has long gone - it is now a neat scheme of sheltered housing for the elderly, called Father Bidone Court, run by an Italian religious order - as has the house Bill Fleming grew up in. A four to five-year-old development of modern terraced houses, where prices now start at around £115,000, have taken the place of the original terrace.

Although the original green space has long gone too, there is a huge green space at one side of the enclave - East Timor Park. The park was thus named in 1997, although not many in the area seem to know that. It stands next to the Liffey Gaels GAA grounds. A walk through the park brings you to a pedestrian bridge over the Chapelizod bypass and down past the Liffey to the Islandbridge war memorial park.

It is not quite the same as it was when Bill Fleming grew up here, in the days when most of the houses were occupied by CIE employees who worked in the old Inchicore works across the far side of Sarsfield Road. Like some of the older people still living in The Ranch, he remembers the area before Ballyfermot was built in the early 1940s, remembers waking up to look over green fields "where lambs leapt and cows grazed". In the 1930s, families paid a rent of about 7s 6d to the landlord, and one woman born and raised there 76 years ago remembers when they were offered for sale to families for £50, an amount some people just couldn't raise. By all accounts, the area is as quiet and as safe as most places in Dublin, with a now familiar mix of original residents, some of their children, and a growing number of young single and professional couples. This is evident looking at the refurbished houses: terracotta pots adorning a small side entrance of one of the end-of-terrace houses hint at polished wooden floors and open plan conversions inside.

There is a large pub - Ruby Finnegans - nearby, on the corner of Sarsfield Road and First Avenue, a newsagents, and a couple of other shops nearby; supermarket shopping can be done at either Crazy Prices, Ballyfermot, or in Marks & Spencer in the Liffey Valley shopping centre.