It's almost impossible to imagine now, but back in the early 1980s the housing market was so slow that a few people, despairing of traditional methods of selling, raffled their houses.
Warwick House, 1 Warwick Terrace, at the junction of Appian Way and Leeson Park, was raffled for £50 tickets. Radio Nova carried advertisements and there was much attendant razzmatazz. Sherry FitzGerald's auction of the house on April 11th is bound to be a much more sober affair, as the large period house now has a guide of £820,000 (€1.04m).
The raffle winner had lived in the country and the house became a shared home, with one of the tenants buying it privately some time later. Over the years he has done a great deal of hands-on refurbishment, ranging from dipping and stripping the pine doors to tackling the basement area.
The house, built in 1861, extends to nearly 3,000 sq ft and there are five bedrooms, two bathrooms and a shower room. It is still lived in as a shared house so the five bedrooms have platform beds.
The front door, to one side of the house, opens into a large entrance hallway with an arched window and an arch leading to the inner hall. The beautifully airy reception rooms interconnect, with the front being larger than the back. Both rooms have their original white marble fireplaces, ceiling roses, cornices and shutters.
There are three bedrooms on the top floor and the basement is a series of three interconnecting rooms including a kitchen, diningroom and livingroom. Sections of the basement walls have been exposed to their original granite. Decoratively, Warwick House is fairly eccentric. The stairs, for example, are painted blue and all the window frames at the back of the house are painted a different colour. Frequent passers-by will know that the shutters are painted a cheery yellow.
The house was built on a triangular site and the 85 ft back garden tapers down to quite a narrow point. It is very private, being surrounded by high granite walls. According to the owners there is a grace and favour arrangement which allows them to park two cars in the back lane. This property has been very well loved by the owner and the people who live there, but the new owners will almost certainly carry out a considerable amount of work, a lot of it decorative. The current owners have, for example, secured planning permission to put double doors from the basement out to the front garden, and had plans to landscape it as a patio to catch the sun.
