A builder who bought a pre-’63 house on a Victorian terrace in Glasthule, Co Dublin in 2016 for €625,000 has revamped it from top to bottom and is now selling it for €1.5 million.
Number 7 Eden Park, a listed building, is now a family home with a smart modern kitchen/breakfastroom/livingroom on the garden-level ground floor and reception rooms and bedrooms upstairs restored in period style.
Elaborate and nearly intact plasterwork upstairs was revealed when suspended ceilings were taken down; the ground floor "was ripped asunder" in the renovation so that it could be damproofed and underfloor heating installed, says Warren Dunne who, with his father Joe, runs Joe Dunne Construction.
The a 353sq m (3,400sq ft) four-bed in walk-in condition is for sale for €1.5 million through agent Owen Reilly. The terrace of 13 houses a short walk to the seafront at Sandycove is set back from the main road from Dún Laoghaire to Dalkey, opposite a green space beside Sandycove Dart station and the local recycling centre.
Shades of grey
Decorated mostly in shades of grey or white, furnished and staged by interiors company House & Garden, it combines modern and period styles in a fashion similar to many such makeovers. The most striking aspect of the modern ground floor is the bright living space opening onto the back patio. Architect Danny Gorman of Hamilton Young Architects created a double height space by removing half of the floor of the hall level return: now a mezzanine with a glazed balcony looks down into the living space. Floor-to-ceiling glazed windows open onto a fairly small but private granite-paved patio. (Mews houses have been built in the back gardens of most houses on the terrace.)
The ground floor, floored with polished oak, is largely open plan, with the kitchen/breakfastroom in the middle. There’s a granite-topped island unit in the kitchen with a wine fridge in it, and a decent sized utility room off. Glazed doors open into the front area, where there’s a den – which could be a fifth bedroom – with a woodburning stove; a striking wetroom, tiled with sparkly black tiles, is under the front stairs, where the coal hole would once have been.
Polished oak stairs lead up to the hall level, where the mezzanine on the return has been fitted out as a study. Two small steps lead up to the more formal part of the house, where original floorboards are painted black.
Black marble
The deep bay window in the drawingroom – restored and double-glazed, like all the other windows in the house – looks out onto the green. The original black marble open fireplace has green tiles inset; the diningroom behind the drawingroom has a similar, but not original, fireplace.
Upstairs, there are four double bedrooms and a family bathroom, all smartly decorated. The main bedroom at the front of the house is the most dramatic: it has rich cornicing and a large centre rose, and two windows – one a deep bay – looking towards Scotsman’s Bay over the roofs of the houses close to St Joseph’s Church in Glasthule.
Warren says that they did consider restoring it as the drawingroom it probably once was, but decided that wouldn’t suit modern living. The unusual en suite in one corner was designed so it wouldn’t interfere with the ceiling: it’s a tiled wetroom with frosted glass dividing it from the bedroom. There’s also a narrow walk-in dressingroom.
The small railed front garden has been landscaped – the builders could not get permission to turn it into a car space. There is residents’ permit parking on the street, near to the Dart station car park.
