DALKEY: €1.9MGarden centre owner Brian Wood is selling his home on Sorrento Road in Dalkey - and the garden he created on solid rock, writes Orna MulcahyProperty Editor
SOLID granite could hardly be considered the most promising base for a garden, but garden centre owner Brian Wood has managed to coax no less than 2,000 plants from his almost vertical, rock-strewn garden on Sorrento Road in Dalkey, Co Dublin.
The Gables is a postcard pretty house set high above the road,near the junction with Sorrento Terrace and the Vico Road, a short walk from Dalkey village and the Dart.
The three-bedroom house stands on a quarter of an acre of steeply sloped grounds, with plenty of off-street parking behind electronically controlled gates. It's for sale through Savills HOK at €1.9 million.
Wood, who runs one of the best loved garden centres on the southside, Murphy Wood, has opened the garden to the public in aid of the Hospice Foundation for many years, knows every patch of ground and every inch of the detached house which he built in the mid-1970s.
The site was originally earmarked for coach-houses to service the grand homes of Sorrento Terrace nearby, but these were never built, and Wood was able to buy three adjoining sites on which to build his own home.
The 260sq m (2,800sq ft) house is arranged on three levels, with a full basement, parking bay and workshop on the ground floor - all of which could be converted into an apartment or incorporated into the house.
Wisteria-clad steps lead up to a wide terrace that wraps around the house, and to the little-used front door. Instead, Wood enters from the parking bay, where there's a staircase leading directly up to the kitchen.
It's a cosy house with a simple layout. The hall level has just one large livingroom that overlooks the front garden through a wide bay window; there's also a simple conservatory, and a pleasant kitchen-cum-diningroom with windows and a door open to the back garden.
The garden rises steeply up to the houses of Beacon Hill, a row of former coastguard cottages, the building of which in the early 1800s caused a question to be raised in parliament as to their exorbitant cost - £900.
The rocky outcrop is now home to scores of types of rhododendron, orchids from Asia and many different varieties of maple and fern. There's a little moss lawn, a pond, and a series of stone steps that rise and fall among the plants all of which can be reached by a custom-built watering system that drenches the entire garden.
Though home to delicate and rare plants, Wood insists that that the garden is low maintenance.
"It has to be because I'm at work most of the time. I give it two really long days of work every year, at Halloween and in March, when I clear it out and lay down manure, but after that it looks after itself."
Upstairs in the house, there are three good-sized bedrooms, the largest of which has an en suite bathroom.
On a damp morning the house seems terribly cosy thanks to its core of 9in insulation which Wood was able to access cheaply through a family connection and installed generously throughout the house.
Wood, who is downsizing to a smaller home in the neighbourhood, says he will miss the house for the party space, and for the fact that it is just a few hundred yards from the sea where he spends long summer evenings swimming and snorkelling.
The Gables, Sorrento Road, Dalkey, Co Dublin
lPostcard pretty house near Dalkey village on a quarter-acre of garden
Agent: Savills HOK
