The couple who bought a house on Spencer Villas in Glenageary in 2012 with a view to renovating it knew what they were doing: they had previously renovated and lived in six houses. Built in 1918, the Edwardian-style house had been owned by one family for more than 50 years, and while everything needed doing, it had many of its original features. One of the owners is a textile designer, and a flair for decoration is evident in the interiors of the house, once featured in Image magazine.
Its new owners retained, repaired or restored features – such as the stained glass panels at the top of the casement bay window in the drawingroom – created a fourth bedroom on the top floor – once a garret with two maids' bedrooms – and built a new kitchen at the back. Now 20 Spencer Villas, a 209sq m (2,250sq ft) four-bedroom semi-detached house is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald for €1.875 million – more than twice the €720,000 the couple paid for it nine years ago. It has a Ber of F.
A decent-sized porch with a tiled floor and windows opens into a small square entrance hall, a pretty room with a wood-burning stove set into a white fireplace with a red-tiled hearth. The drawingroom on the right has a large white fireplace with green tiles inset, ceiling coving and tall bay windows with plantation blinds. Like most of the rooms in the house, it has polished wooden floors.
Double doors lead to a livingroom – presumably once the diningroom – which has a matching white fireplace but with deep red tiles. A door from here as well as another door in the front hall open down a couple of steps into the new kitchen. The front hall is small, but there is room for a narrow floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, and off it, a smart downstairs shower room and a decent-sized utility room with a door to a side passage.
Architect Brian Cullen of Cullen Payne Architects designed the kitchen: floored with pretty decorative tiles, it's bright, with a high-arched, timber-panelled ceiling with six Velux windows, accordion windows at one side looking on to tall ferns, and two narrow floor-to-ceiling windows on the other looking on to a wide stone-walled passage. Kitchen units are painted grey and the island unit and countertops are wooden-topped.
Shelves in a small office at the back of the kitchen are filled with the owner’s colourful textiles. Floor-to-ceiling accordion windows beside the office open out to a large stone patio. Steps lead down to a square of lawn bordered by gravel paths and four built-in concrete seats. There is a large brick outdoor fireplace at the end of the garden, next to a stone-faced garden shed.
Steep steps from the front hall lead up to a small landing off which are three double bedrooms and a family bathroom with metro-tiled walls, a bath and shower and a separate part-tiled toilet: fittings came from Fired Earth.
The main bedroom at the front of the house has fitted wardrobes on either side of a white-painted fireplace with cast-iron inset. The double bedroom at the back has a similar white fireplace looking over the new park and playing fields on Hudson Road towards Scotsman’s Bay.
A door on the landing that looks as if it conceals a hot press opens to a steep flight of stairs to the top of the house, where once there were two small unheated bedrooms. This has been renovated into a cosy bedroom/sittingroom with a white-painted wooden floor, a study space and two Velux windows with views over to Howth.
There is room to park two cars in the gravelled front garden. Spencer Villas is a cul-de-sac off Adelaide Road in Glenageary, a short walk to Glasthule and the Sandycove Dart station.
