A semi-detached five-bedroom house in The Burnaby, Greystones, Co Wicklow is a bright, light-filled home with evidence of its owner’s occupation everywhere. There are easels in one of the reception rooms where artist Mary Kelly holds classes and vivid art in all the rooms. Now that her three children are in their 20s, she is selling the house the family moved into 25 years ago.
Kincora, 2 Kinlen Road, is for sale by private treaty through Sherry FitzGerald for €850,000. The house was built in 1902 by a developer called Kinlen, the date etched by one of his workmen into the chimney breast in the attic. Eamon de Valera reportedly lived next door in the early years of his marriage, up to 1921 – at a time when he must have often had to visit the house in secret for fear of arrest.
The 219sq m (2,350sq ft) house is large but not sprawling and has most of its original features, such as the pretty covered verandah over a tiled entrance porch at the front, intact. Most rooms, including the bedrooms, have original timber fireplaces with coloured tiles inset, deep ceiling coving, picture rails, pitch pine floors and internal doors.
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Two reception rooms open off the front hall: on the left is the drawingroom, currently used for art classes, which has a large bay window, large fireplace and built-in bookshelves. On the right is a sittingroom with a handsome corner fireplace. Behind this, looking onto the back garden, is another, larger room, originally the diningroom, now used as a study.
There is a shower room at the end of the hall off a porch which opens into the kitchen. The oven under the original chimney breast is not an Aga but one could easily be installed here. A step up leads to the bright maple-floored breakfastroom which has a Velux over the table and French doors opening into the garden.
Upstairs, there’s a family bathroom, separate toilet and hot press on a spacious return. A few more steps up lead to a landing off which there are five bedrooms: the two rooms at the front of the house mirror the shape of the reception rooms below. The main bedroom has a wall of mirror-fronted wardrobes, large bay window and tile-inset fireplace. This and two other bedrooms are doubles, the remaining two are singles. A pull-down attic ladder in one of these singles leads to a decent-sized L-shaped attic.
The garden at the back is filled with colour in May and has both an old apple tree and a magnolia.
The leafy, mostly Edwardian enclave that is The Burnaby is a short walk from the Dart station, near shops, the sea, a new swimming pool, and rugby, GAA and golf clubs. It was, says Mary Kelly, a great place to rear children.
