The houses in St Helen’s Woods, Booterstown, Co Dublin, look similar on the outside. But many of the people who own them have adapted and expanded them over the past three decades and so it is with the couple who bought 23 Hampton Park, a four-bed semi, 22 years ago. Over those years, they have adapted and expanded it to meet the needs of their growing family. Now the C1-rated 160sq m (1,722sq ft) four-bed semi is for sale through Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty, seeking €1.095 million.
The woods, which give the name to the development belonged to one of south county Dublin’s grandest houses, St Helen’s, dating from 1754. From 1925 to 1988, the house – now the Radisson Hotel – was the headquarters of the Christian Brothers in Ireland. Developer Sean Dunne’s company Berland Homes bought the house and 71 acres of land in 1989 for about £19 million.
The homes built in the 1990s have weathered well, and St Helen’s Wood is a quiet, mature suburb off Booterstown Avenue, close to the N11. Homes there have sold in 2023 at prices ranging from €850,000 to €1.8 million. The original Steward’s House, the office for the Berland development in the early 1990s, went on sale for €1.5 million last October.
The owners of number 23 undertook a major job to reconfigure their house in 2008. Now the front door opens into a large hall with a tiled floor, off which is a good-sized study looking over the front garden, a downstairs toilet and a small livingroom to which the owners, now with three teenage children, can retreat when the teenagers have friends in.
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The heart of the home is the large open-plan oak-floored kitchen-dining-family room. Working with Optimise Design, they extended the original kitchen, a very bright space, with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows/sliding doors looking on to the back garden, as well as Velux roof windows. The Newcastle Design kitchen has smart grey units and an island which, like the counter, is topped with polished granite. There’s a good-sized utility room off the kitchen with a traditional and very useful traditional clothes airer suspended from the ceiling.
The cosy livingroom off the kitchen has built-in shelves on either side of the open fireplace with its sandstone surround; French doors open from it into the garden.
Upstairs are four bedrooms, two doubles and two singles. The main bedroom has – like two of the other bedrooms – built-in wardrobes and an en suite shower room. The family bathroom is mostly tiled.
The attic space is large says the owner; other houses in St Helen’s have successfully converted them.
The wide back garden is in lawn, with a patio at one side, a covered seat at the back and a side passage to the front. There’s off-street parking at the side of the front lawn.
