Just off the Glenageary Road Upper, in an estate off Mounttown Road Lower, is Highthorn Park, a mature neighbourhood of double-fronted terraced homes right beside Cualanor Park.
Number 6 is a home that has been tastefully upgraded by its owners since they bought it in 2006, gradually improving its fabric and extending it to suit the needs of their growing family.
They have put a lot of thought into its layout so that it now functions really well for family life. This style of house generally has two small rooms to the front, one on either side of the hall. The owners installed a sizeable utility room in the one to the right, where there is also a guest toilet, and incorporated the left room into a larger eat-in kitchen.
This now runs the depth of the original part of the house and is L-shaped with the working kitchen set in a C-shape. This initially seems counterintuitive, but the set-up gives you a really smart work triangle where there is room for floor-to-ceiling storage on one side.
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This affords a decent-sized eat-in area that extends across the width of the house to give you space for small kids to play while you can still keep an eye on them. The corner fireplace now houses a wood-burning stove.
Most homeowners would have installed the kitchen into the single-storey extension to the rear that they added about five years ago. But the way they’ve done it gives you good sized spaces that now mean the ground floor is set out in a broken-plan fashion.
The garden room is styled with mid-century modern furniture and this is where they do most of their living, for it opens out to the south-facing garden and is light-filled thanks to Velux windows overhead. It also means you can walk away from a messy kitchen and not have to look at it – at least until it is your turn to do such chores. The garden has a paved patio and is also set out in lawn.
Upstairs there are three bedrooms, two good-size doubles and a single, as well as the family bathroom.
The family has also converted the attic and the additional space will really suit someone working from home or a teen who is at an age when he or she wants as little interaction with family life as possible.
The house, which has a D2 Ber rating and off-street parking for at least two cars, is seeking €675,000 through agents Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty. The location adjoins Monkstown and Glenageary, with has great bus connectivity to schools and the city centre.
Dún Laoghaire’s People’s Park is less than a 10 minutes’ walk and with the local shops nearby, you can even do a supermarket shop without ever needing to get into a car.
