Properties with large gardens in good suburbs are achieving incredible prices because of their development potential as planners allow for higher housing densities. Edel Morgan reports

The staggering €45 million paid for Chesterfield, the Blackrock home on 8.8 acres of the late co-founder of Roadstone, Tom Roche, shows how far developers are prepared to go to get their diggers on a piece of valuable infill land in Dublin.

Chesterfield is the latest in a long line of period houses and stately homes on substantial grounds to be snapped up by developers - and gradually swallowed up by high density apartment and townhouse development.

There is expected to be much developer interest in Redcourt - regarded as one of the finest 19th century homes in Clontarf - which is being auctioned on June 2nd through Sherry FitzGerald and has a guide of €4.5 million. With its 1.65-acre orchard and gardens it is believed to represent the last such site available in Clontarf.

In Dundrum, Orchardton - a Victorian villa on 1.6 acres - is being marketed as "a builder's dream" and is to be auctioned on May 26th with a guide of €3 million.

While some see this trend as a regrettable overdevelopment of certain suburbs, town planning consultant Francis Neary believes we need to be "a bit unsentimental" about trying to hang on to the past in areas "where some of the buildings are designed for big bourgeois families of an earlier epoch. They are very nice but are redundant and take up a lot of space at the expense of contemporary housing demand, forcing people to leapfrog into all parts of Leinster."

He suggests that a property tax be introduced so, "people living in big houses would pay the tax and continue to under-occupy urban land, as is their right. A waiver would have to be allowed, which would further undermine property tax as an instrument of planning policy."

How much the grounds of a house will fetch depends on their location and on the number of residential units it will fit. Already the grounds of Chesterfield, sold to Myles Crofton of Namus Developments, have been sized up to fit an estimated 100 detached houses which industry sources guess will sell for around €2 million each.

In March, P J Hegarty and Sons paid over €22 million for an infill site with planning permission for 116 apartments on Carr Communications' grounds in Booterstown. Another planning application is pending for four townhouses.

Developer Sean Dunne paid €10.54 million at the height of the building boom for Hollybrook on Brighton Road in Foxrock, a house on three acres. After a number of planning attempts and considerable local objection, he finally got permission to build 43 units on the site. Opposition to infill development is mounting in many areas. Foxrock Area Development Ltd (FADL) has been reported as saying their area is "under siege" by property developers seeking to replace its fine homes with blocks of luxury apartments.

Though the residents took heart from a recent decision by An Bord Pleanála to overturn planning permission for 46 apartments, a terrace of eight townhouses and gate-lodge at Grove House on Hainault Road, they saw this as "just the latest chapter in an ongoing battle". Silkmore Developments, who bought Grove House in 2001 for €6.3 million, have hit back with another planning application for the three-acre site - this time for a radically scaled down eight apartments and nine five-bed detached houses.

In Blackrock, residents have challenged plans by Frank Cruess-Callaghan to build 40 apartments at Ferndene, on Deansgrange Road in Blackrock, Co Dublin.

The Cruess-Callaghans put the house on the market over three years ago but withdrew it when it failed to reach the guide of €3.81m.

Residents in Glenageary have appealed planning permission granted to the developer who paid €5 million for Traverslea on Lower Glenageary Road, Co Dublin, for 36 apartments on a two-acre site to its rear.

"Much of the residential development in the Dublin local authority areas is making up for empty nests and one and two person households," says Francis Neary. "Critics of the National Spatial Strategy here seem to favour big state-led development on the model of UK new towns but what we need is to build up populations in existing places."

And it's not just the grounds of period houses that are being usurped. In a city where development land is at a premium, few homeowners with a large back or side garden with access are unaware they are sitting on a valuable asset.

Planning wars are being waged in many neighbourhoods. On one side are the homeowners/developers who intend to exploit the valuable development potential of the gardens or grounds attached to a property, and on the other are the local residents who fear they will lose the privacy and enjoyment of their homes through "overlooking", "overshadowing" and the drone of construction noise.

The premium paid for a house with a substantial corner site or rear garden is considerable. People with corner sites will most likely have had speculators knocking at their door, asking to buy the site for a substantial sum - sometimes subject to acquiring planning permission. Even landlocked gardens have become an endangered species with people choosing to build out as far as they possibly can with enormous extensions.

If you decide to sell your house, a large south-facing garden that is neatly kept will add 5-10 per cent to the selling price of your home, says Conor Gallagher of Douglas Newman Good. If there is scope to build on it, it will be closer to 25-30 per cent.

"You only get these very big gardens in areas built before the mid-1960s. After that they got smaller. It is rare to get a post-1970 house with a very big garden. The likes of houses in Stillorgan, Sutton Park and Rathfarnham built around that era, for example, might have fine big four-bed detached houses but the gardens will rarely be bigger than 35-50 feet long," says Gallagher.

There is such a thing as too much garden, says Simon Ensor of Sherry FitzGerald. "You have to maintain it and it's costly getting a gardener in.

"A house with a huge garden with no development potential that is purely an amenity won't get huge additional value once it's over half an acre. The next quarter of an acre won't add anything like as much." He advises caution before building on a corner site.

"It could result in the diminution of value of the original house and have significant tax implications, leaving the owner liable for capital gains tax if they decide to sell. If they sell the site as part of a house under an acre there are no tax implications."

The owner of 4 Proby Square in Blackrock, however, threw such caution to the wind and it appears to have paid off. The three-storey period house was bought in September for €1.625 million, remodelled extensively and put back on the market recently with a considerably smaller garden. It is being auctioned on May 26th with a guide of €1.3 million.

However, the rest of the quarter of an acre of side garden is going to be used to build a replica house.

The premiums involved can cause even the most ardent anti-development campaigner to change tack. Take, for example, the case of the neighbour in Sandymount who appealed a mews development in her next door neighbour's garden on the grounds it would obliterate its fox population but is now reputed to be in the process of applying for permission for her own mews development with a number of other owners in her apartment building.

Conor Gallagher says that while land values in desirable locations are high, the quality of houses in the upper price range is generally quite poor. "Compare them to houses in many modern UK cities or in places like Florida or Cape Town, where every house is magnificent and architect-designed. But here it's now all high density and detached houses are relatively rare. There is not as much land available and we are going to see a lot more infill development."

However, he doesn't think that people should necessarily give in to the inevitability of this type of development.

"It is perfectly understandable that people object when they feel a development will affect their property and they are right."

Simon Ensor believes that planners won't pay "a massive amount of attention to people who simply don't want development beside them under any circumstances.

"On the other hand, if a balcony is going to directly overlook your property, then you're right to object and that is what the planning process is for."

Francis Neary agrees that people can feel "very emotional about their homes and neighbourhoods and the general environment. I think the architects and other professions have been at fault in some cases of infill either because they have not been robust enough in telling their clients what is not on, vis-à-vis the effect on adjoining properties, or because they themselves don't understand or care enough.

"Developers always get blamed for bad proposals which is not always fair. With the best will in the world, a developer or architect can go through pre-applications and consultations and proceed on the basis of planners' opinion, and spend a lot of money completing plans, but they do this with no way of knowing if the planners' indications will lead to a favourable decision at planning authority level or on appeal."