A family with a number of people working from home would be happy with a house on Avoca Road in Blackrock. It has a good-sized downstairs office, a study area off the main bedroom, a box room that could be extra working space and a good-sized garden shed currently used as a gym – and, as well as that, a carpeted attic.
Architect Tom Murphy, who extended the house after he and his wife Laurence bought it in 1991, has his own office, well fitted with desk and cupboards, to the right of the large entrance hall. It's where he runs his company Murphy Inventions – he is developing, among other things, a turbine designed to turn ocean currents into electricity, a dome to capture methane from cattle and a design for affordable housing.
With their three children grown, the couple are downsizing. Their semi-detached 218sq m (2,350sq ft) four-bed – plus 46sq m (500sq ft) attic – at 5 Avoca Road, Blackrock, Co Dublin, is for sale through Lisney for €1,950,000. Its Ber is C2.
A tiled front porch opens into a bright L-shaped entrance hall, floored, like most of the rest of the downstairs, in maple. A door at the end opens to the wide, bright, open-plan livingroom/diningroom/kitchen at the back of the house. The sloping roof over the dining/kitchen space is panelled with pine and has three large Velux windows. Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors open to the back garden.
The open plan space, big enough for a party – 90 people came to Tom’s 50th birthday – has a Godin wood-burning stove on one side of the livingroom and an open fireplace with a cast-iron inset on the other. Sliding doors open from the livingroom to a small sittingroom with another open fireplace, built-in bookshelves and a bow window overlooking the front garden. The kitchen has a tiled floor, timber units and a timber-topped island. Off it, there’s a decent-sized utility room and downstairs toilet.
Upstairs, there are four double bedrooms and a box room. The main bedroom overlooks the front garden, and opens to a study/dressingroom looking over the back. New owners might consider upgrading the fully-tiled family bathroom, which has a bath but no separate shower, perhaps by extending into the boxroom.
All the bedrooms are fitted with wardrobes, and some have desks. The carpeted attic up a steep flight of stairs has deep Velux windows looking over the back gardens of houses on Glenart Avenue.
Outside, a path leads across the back lawn from a circular sandstone patio to the white-painted shed at the end. This currently has gym equipment in it, but has potential to be another work space or studio. The garden is fringed with mature bushes; a stone wall at the back, next to the shed, is the gable of mews houses at the end of a lane next door to number five.
There is room to park a number of cars in the gravelled front garden. Avoca Road is a fairly short walk from Blackrock village, and its two shopping centres.
