Currane, 12 Old Quarry, Dalkey, Co Dublin, was a far more modest bungalow when it sold for €750,000 in 2020. But its owners wanted a new house, so they demolished the old single-storey property and built a large modern home to suit the needs of their family.
Currane has a playroom downstairs with a built-in playhouse and slide for their three children, who are under 10, a boot room with a shower just for their two dogs, a cinema room with a fully equipped bar, a main bedroom with a 210cm by 210cm emperor bed and an en suite with a his-and-hers steam room off it as well as a large walk-in dressingroom.
Outside, there’s a good-sized home office. One of the owners is a builder and his wife is very interested in interiors, getting many of her ideas from Instagram. They worked on the renovation together, along with interior designer Emma Cooling.
The house has everything they want – except a large garden. “If we could lift this house and bring it with us, we would,” says one of the owners. They hope to build again, probably in Rathmichael, Dublin 18, on a bigger site with lots of space. So Currane, a 404sq m (4,349sq ft) four-bed, is for sale for €2.5 million through Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty. It has an A2 Ber rating.
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Currane is a wide two-storey house standing near the top of a small cul-de-sac off Dalkey Avenue that leads down to the Metals, the walkway beside the Dart line from Dún Laoghaire to Dalkey. Outside, the ground floor is clad with granite, the first floor with charcoal-coloured charred timber (by the Shou Sugi Ban method). The house is very bright, with walls painted mostly white and floor-to-ceiling windows in many rooms.
Bronze double-front doors with sunburst handles open in to a very large entrance hall where a striking curved wall clad with walnut panelling faces the doors. To the left are a small double bedroom with an en suite with marble-effect tiles, a guest toilet and a boot room opening on to a side patio. This is where the family’s dogs – a large English sheepdog and a smaller terrier – have their own slightly-raised enclosed shower.
At the end of the hall is a large, dark cinema room, floored with walnut like many of the rooms in the house; a proper bar with a curved walnut counter and banquette seating faces the large TV screen, beneath which there’s an enclosed timber-effect fireplace. The walls are panelled and both they and the ceiling are painted green; there’s a skylight over the large seating.
The bright open-plan kitchen/dining/livingroom off the front hall at the opposite side of the house is a complete contrast. Double Crittall-style doors open into the walnut-floored livingroom, which has a stone-effect fireplace. A period dining table divides this space from the kitchen. Its large island unit has a dark brown Dekton countertop veined with a rust/gold colour (Dekton is a man-made, durable, heat-resistant product). Floor-to-ceiling glass doors open from here on to the patio garden.
A good-sized utility room opens off the kitchen and next to that is a large children’s playroom; it has a floor-to-ceiling blackboard, built-in playhouse/treehouse with a slide, and a pull-out daybed for sleepovers. All the carpentry in the house was done by local carpenter Barry Archbold.
Curved walnut stairs lead up to a curved landing off which are three bedrooms, the family bathroom and a laundry chute. The main bedroom is pure luxury – the owners got Archbold to build their bed around an emperor mattress that comes from the Spinery in Dún Laoghaire, and they designed the floor-to-ceiling walnut backdrop behind the bed. The large en suite bathroom is tiled with marble-effect white and gold tiles from Porcelanosa in London; it has a free-standing oval bath with a brushed gold-coloured tap. Off the bathroom is a green mosaic-tiled shower/steam room with seating.
And as if all that isn’t enough, there’s a long walk-in dressingroom off the bedroom with lots of shelving and hanging space, a champagne fridge and tall mirrors at each end of the room. Two balconies off the main bedroom provide good views over Dún Laoghaire harbour to Howth.
A few steps up lead to the family bathroom and two more double bedrooms, one en suite. Both are decorated as children’s rooms and have clever built-in bunk-beds with storage space.
Outside, work is just being completed on building a barbecue/outdoor kitchen in the sandstone-paved back patio. A separate outside timber-floored home office/garden room is well fitted out. There’s a small artificial grass lawn at the front of the house: enclosed by high walls; the house is very private.
It’s a techie home, with a Proair heat recovery system with underfloor heating, a sound system, CCTV and “an app for everything”, says the owner. There is also space to park three cars in an outside bay.
