A house in Booterstown built in 1934 has the kind of period details that have often been ripped out of other homes from this era. It has original art deco fireplaces with timber surrounds in interconnecting reception rooms, as well as original pitch-pine floors and brass handles on internal doors.
When the current owners moved in, there were even servants’ bells in the old kitchen – which tells you something about life for 1930’s southsiders, even those living in fairly modest semi-detached houses. (Apparently a servant lived in a room at the top of the stairs opposite the family bedrooms.)
Now, 83 St Helen's Road, Booterstown, Co Dublin, a 171sq m (1,850sq ft) four-bed Crampton-built semi-detached is for sale for €1.175 million through Sherry FitzGerald. The vendors, who have lived here for nearly 20 years, extended the original kitchen, put in new Senator uPVC windows in the style of the originals in 2017, and in 2019, insulated the bedrooms and converted the attic.
St Helen’s Road is a crescent of houses off the Rock Road opposite the Booterstown Nature Reserve; number 83 is about four houses away from the bend at the top of the road, furthest away from Rock Road.
Pictures and a video of the house show an arched redbrick entrance opening into a carpeted hall. On the right of the hall are interconnecting reception rooms; the living room has a bay window and the original art deco fireplace with its high oak mantelpiece, inset with original tiles. It opens into the family room through sliding doors in a wide arch, a woodburning stove is set into this art deco fireplace.
Glazed doors from here open into a sunroom with a tiled floor, next to the kitchen/breakfast room at the back of the house. This has a white-tiled floor, cream units, and a wall of windows looking into the back garden, with a door opening on to the patio outside. New owners might consider reconfiguring the kitchen and sunroom, or extending again to create the kind of large open-plan kitchen/living room/dining room area so popular at the moment.
On the left of the hall is a large utility room and downstairs shower, in a space that had been the garage. The vendors added a bedroom – one of four upstairs – above this space.
The large main bedroom at the front of the house upstairs has a bay window and an original fireplace with an oak mantelpiece. It has a door to a walk-in dressing room that could be converted into an en suite as it is plumbed.
There is a shower room and a separate family bathroom upstairs and stairs leading to a converted attic with a Velux window that could be a home office or bedroom.
Outside, there is a large paved patio stepping down into a back lawn with a greenhouse at its corner – the garden is 68ft (20.7m) long, says the agent. A side passage leads to the gravelled front garden, where there’s space to park up to three cars.
