This Week: Walkinstown

Number 36 Hughes Road North is a recently-refurbished three-bed semi-detached house in a quiet crescent of houses off Balfe Road in Walkinstown, Dublin 12. In walk-in condition, it is for sale through Douglas Newman Good for offers over £115,000.

A hallway with bold red wallpaper below a dado rail opens into a good-sized livingroom/diningroom with a marble fireplace with gas fire inset. A neat kitchen/breakfastroom has a tiled splashback above the counter and fitted timber units. The back garden is a triangular shape, and there is a large railed front garden with off-street parking in the driveway, to the garage. (Many houses in the area have replaced front gardens with cobblelock driveways.)

Upstairs, number 36 has three bedrooms and a small but lovely newly-fitted bathroom, with a timber floor. The main bedroom has a wall of mirrored sliderobes which reflect sunshine pouring into the room and brightening it up. There is another small double, and a neat child's room with louvred closet doors. The attic has pull-down stairs. Just a few minutes walk from the junction of Drimnagh Road and the Long Mile Road, it is close to several swift bus routes into the city centre.

Two other houses in the area - both near the Walkinstown/Drimnagh border - also illustrate how once-dark 1940s/1950s houses can be brightened up with modern interiors ideas.

Number 23 Slieve Bloom Park is a three-bed semi which has been transformed by opening up the ground floor. There is a small sittingroom at the front of the house, with a small bay window that has views of nearby Drimnagh Castle. But the room behind it at the back of the house has been turned into a large diningroom/lounge with polished timber flooring, with a galley-style kitchen off it between the two rooms. The kitchen has attractive green timber units and a tiled floor. Outside is a long, well-landscaped garden with patio, shrubs, and at the end, a large workshop also used as a utility room.

Upstairs, there are two double bedrooms and a small box room, and a fully-tiled, recently-refurbished bathroom. This house is for sale through Douglas Newman Good for £125,000-plus.

Number 9 Errigal Road, is a three-bed mid-terrace home in a quiet cul-de-sac close to the main Drimnagh Road: the owners have made a small house appear bright and spacious by painting the walls everywhere white and making best possible use of available space. The result is a very attractive home with a surprisingly long, landscaped back garden.

Downstairs, there is a livingroom with an attractive cast-iron coal-effect gas fire with a slate hearth, a diningroom next door with a fitted Parkray unit, and the kitchen, cleverly created using space from the hallway. It has a tiled floor, a built-in De Dietrich electric hob, part-tiled walls and lots of power points. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms and the third room, currently used as a study, with a power point and six power points, that would suit somebody working from home very well. The main bedroom is a neat double which, like the house in Hughes Road North, has mirrored sliderobes that reflect the light, making it a peaceful, comfortable room. Like the other rooms in the house, it has doubleglazed tilt and turn windows. The bathroom is a delight: it has an electric shower, bidet, part-tiled walls, and a recessed oval wash-hand-basin set into the top of a fitted cupboard. This house is for sale through Douglas Newman Good for offers over £105,000.

Walkinstown is a part of Dublin 12 that is fast growing beyond the reach of the first-time buyer. Demand for homes here because of its proximity to Dublin's city centre has continued to grow throughout 1998, and prices have gone up by an estimated 10 to 15 per cent since the beginning of the year, reckons Douglas Newman Good agent Gary Jacob.

A house in Walkinstown costs an average of around £120,000/£125,000, although there are former local authority homes to be found for about £110,000/£115,000 as well as houses for between £130,000 and £150,000 in Cherryfield, going as high as £170,000/£180,000 on Walkinstown Road and Cromwellsfort Road. But if you look hard, you can find something less expensive: a terraced three-bed 1960s-built former local authority house in Limekiln Green recently sold for around £100,000. As everywhere, what influences price is location: Paul Dorney of Prestige Properties, probably the longest-established local agent in Walkinstown, says that former 1950s local authority homes in Walkinstown Green (near the Drimnagh Road end of the area) make around £100,000, while prices for a terraced former local authority house with kitchen extensions in "The Saints" (an area off St Peter's Road where all the roads are named after saints) can go from £115,000 to £125,000.

Walkinstown is a much bigger area than might at first appear: it stretches from the Half-Way House pub on Drimnagh Road far past the infamously busy Walkinstown roundabout over as far as the border with Tallaght at Greenhills, and touches the fringes of Terenure/Templeogue. The majority of houses in the area were privately built, and former local authority homes are a smaller percentage of the total housing stock compared to neighbouring Crumlin, a predominantly former local authority area. (Dorney reckons about three-quarters of the homes were privately built.)

Words like settled and respectable spring to mind walking around the neigbourhood: just a few minutes walk from the busy Drimnagh Road, a crescent like Hughes Road - North, East, and South - is quiet and private. And there are plenty of green spaces all over the neighbourhood.

Indeed, one of the area's surprise attractions is Tymon Park, a 320-acre, beautifully-maintained, and well-patrolled (by four park wardens) public park owned by South Dublin County Council. This large park, divided by the M50, but linked by pedestrian bridges across it, has attractive man-made lakes with glossy ducks and contented-looking swans, a playground and attractive walkways: near the main entrance, there's a pretty pedestrian bridge over a small waterfall. The park has 26 football pitches, tennis courts, is home to two GAA clubs, Faugh's, and St Jude's, and the National Basketball Arena.

This is in the part of Walkinstown south of the roundabout, a newer part of Walkinstown built mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, compared to the Drimnagh side of Walkinstown, built in the 1940s and 1950s. But as in so many other parts of Dublin, there are still people living here who remember the area when it was still farmland, when cows grazed in Kilnamanagh. It's hard to imagine, with the M50 roaring past nearby. But one woman who grew up here in the 1940s and 1950s - and who can name the handful of original residents still living here -says that there is still a great sense of community in Walkinstown, that it's a neighbourhood where people have known each other for years. There are two community centres, and active residents' associations.

Walkinstown is certainly well-serviced with schools, churches, shops, pubs, and restaurants, like the landmark Kestrel on the Walkinstown roundabout, or Eleanora's, on the Drimnagh Road. There is a Superquinn on the Walkinstown Road, and The Square in Tallaght is easily accessible. But all over Dublin 12, there seem to be plenty of thriving neighbourhood shopping areas. The schools range from the Christian Brothers school next to Drimnagh Castle on the Drimnagh Road, over to Greenhills Community College and a girls' secondary school run by the Sisters of Charity of St Paul the Apostle nearby in the Greenpark area of Walkinstown.

Many of the people buying homes here, say agents, are people trading up from Drimnagh and Crumlin, who want a larger home in Dublin 12. There are, to date, very few private apartment developments, apart from one off Whitehall Road west where one-beds cost around £88,000, according to Dorney. Although it is further from the city centre, it is still a fairly swift run into the city.