For those with young children who aren’t quite ready to live in something that resembles a play pen, 68 Avoca Park has a lot to offer. The owners have three small children and a friendly dog, and yet you can easily imagine swanning around the immaculate kitchen in a slinky frock (for the women, obviously) while clutching a chilled Martini.
“It’s a fabulous house to bring up children,” they agree. “Completely safe, but it still looks grown up.” The family is moving to a slightly larger house in the same area, though there’s scope to expand in this one. The 236sq m of accommodation was originally a five-bedroomed house when the development was built in 1995, but as they didn’t realise they were going to have “quite so many children”, they converted one of the bedrooms to a dressing room, so that the front of the house upstairs is now a dramatic and luxurious master bedroom-ensuite-dressing room complex that is a very attractive proposition.
There are three further bedrooms, all doubles, one of which is en suite. To get even more space, you could also copy the neighbours who have extended up into their attic space to get yet another bedroom. Downstairs there’s a lovely flow to the spaces as the dining room leads through to the bright kitchen/breakfast room, which in turn opens up to the living room.
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French windows lead from the kitchen and dining areas out to enclosed patio gardens. Outside, which is a blissfully secluded suntrap, there is an office space and scope to knock through to the utility room, so even if the layout of Number 68 isn’t quite what you’re after (though it looks rather clever to me), you have lots of room to move things around.
The patio-treatment has a Japanese design, and is a boon, say the owners, because you can send the kids out and they “come back in clean”.
The fittings are high-spec, with integrated sound, underfloor heating, double glazing and gas central heating. There’s gated off-street parking, and the overall Avoca Park development is a mature enclosure, with grassy areas, just a short walk to Carysfort Park. Plus there are all the schools, shops and amenities of Blackrock down the road.
No 68 is for sale through Hunters for €1.22 million, which compares to €975,000 that the similar No 72 sold for last July.
While this undoubtedly reflects the rise in prices for this kind of house being seen across the capital, it’s probably substantially less than you’d pay for the same style of house a couple of miles up the road in Foxrock.
