Two trophy redbricks on Ailesbury Road

21 Ailesbury Road: €12m and 7 Ailesbury Road: €9m It's rare for two houses on Ailesbury Road to come on the market at the same time. Bernice Harrison and Orna Mulcahy go visiting

The advised minimum value (AMV) of €12 million isn't going to faze the handful of people in the market for 21 Ailesbury Road. That's the sort of money buyers looking to get into one of the bigger houses on this trophy Dublin 4 road have been paying.

Number 21 is, at 460sq m (4,950sq ft), a particularly large house with a 28-metre south-facing garden and an original coach-house with planning permission.

It's been lived in by the same family for a generation and they are now downsizing.

Lisney will be auctioning 21 Ailesbury Road on May 17th.

It's certainly fit for a large, growing family - there are five bedrooms - and at garden level there is a self-contained two-bedroom apartment accessed both from inside and through an entrance at the side.

This is a very impressive house with elegant proportions on every level. It's semi-detached, set back from the road and everything about it shows it has been well-maintained and cared for over the years.

The grandest rooms are the two reception rooms - the beautifully proportioned livingroom to the front opening into a formal diningroom to the back.

All the expected period features are there, from the fireplaces to the decorative plasterwork.

There's also another smaller room fitted out as a home office. The fairly ordinary family kitchen is on this level - for practical purposes, that's not so unusual in a house this size.

It's in the back return with access down to the back garden via an attractive iron staircase.

Upstairs there are five large bedrooms and the main one is particularly impressive, as it mirrors the downstairs reception room and so has both a deep bay and a tall window looking down over this leafy stretch of the road.

Down at garden level, the two-bedroom apartment shows signs of recent refurbishment, including a modern kitchen and fresh decoration.

At some point in the past a flat-roofed extension was added to the return at garden level and this now seems utilitarian and out of character. New owners will probably look to rework this area to give better access to the splendid garden and also to rethink the family kitchen.

They'll also tackle the old fashioned bathrooms with their coloured 1970s-style suites. Having paid over €12 million, no one is going to want to look at an avocado-coloured sink.

The back garden is long, sunny, and mature. At the end is the original coach-house complete with ladder stairs up to the loft area and a charming old world atmosphere. It has planning permission to be converted into a mews residence.

Wilmer House, at 7 Ailesbury Road, was named after the daughter of the man who built the house in the 1860s. He gave it to her as a present, a generous gesture that is frequently repeated these days as wealthy business families realise the advantages of handing over fast-appreciating real estate rather than cash to the next generation.

Ailesbury Road houses have proved a brilliant investment given that in the 1980s and early 1990s you could still pick up one up for less than £500,000.

Today, number 7 is worth over €9 million, the advised minimum value (AMV) being quoted by Lisney prior to auction on May 24th. It has a full garden and mews potential.

Sandwiched between the embassies of Poland and Argentina, the house overlooks the buildings of nearby St Michael's College to the rear. A single-storey garage and workshop with access from a laneway alongside the house could be converted into a mews.

The current owners bought the five-bedroom house from a Mrs Dooley, a well-known antiques dealer who left several interesting features behind, including a fine stained glass fanlight in the hallway and two sets of classical pillars in the back garden.

It's a lovely, gracious house that has been very well maintained, but is now likely to be made over entirely since buyers at this level of the market generally want more opulent, high tech interiors.

At present, it has 388sq m (4,167sq ft) of living space with a self- contained apartment on the ground floor.

The glory of these houses is in interconnecting reception rooms at hall level which are among the biggest and the best in Dublin: 13ft high ceilings, superb plasterwork and very tall, sash windows are the norm.

In number 7 there are fine original fireplaces and tall sash windows with curved upper frames.

By contrast, the kitchen overlooking the back garden is modest, though extremely well fitted. It leads out to a conservatory with a railed balcony overlooking the garden.

Upstairs, there's a study or bedroom on the return, and four further bedrooms on the first floor. The main bedroom and its en suite bathroom span the entire front of the house.

The ground floor, which has the same high ceilings as the hall level, comprises a large livingroom with parquet flooring and some interesting built-in Gothic-style cupboards installed in Mrs Dooley's day; two bedrooms, a sizeable kitchen and a second livingroom with wide patio doors leading to the back garden.