There aren't that many €2 million-plus houses on the market at the moment, but of those that are, many are in Foxrock, Dublin 18. At least three are on Hainault Road, off Westminster Road and not far from Foxrock village. On one side of the road are stately Edwardian homes built for gentry at the turn of the 20th century; on the other are a number of large modern homes built in the boom.
Hainault House is one of the originals: a Richard Orpen-designed Arts and Crafts-style house built in about 1900, this 245sq m (2,635sq ft) four-bedroom detached house sits on more than half an acre of beautiful gardens. It's on the market through Lisney for €2.25 million.
A writer who interviewed Orpen for the Irish Builder in 1904 said that he was responsible for "quite a colony of pretty red-tiled gabled houses in the fashionable residential district of Foxrock". Hainault House is very much one of these.
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The owners of Hainault did a major job on it 20 years ago, says agent David Bewley, and it has clearly been maintained very well since then. They retained many of its period features – timber veranda and timber balcony above it, wide entrance porch, panelled internal doors, handsome staircase – while turning it into a comfortable family home with en-suite bedrooms, timber floors, new windows and a new kitchen.
The three reception rooms open off the front hall, which has an unusual feature that makes it very bright: an open square in the ceiling looking up the stairwell to a skylight at the top of the house. The diningroom is dual-aspect and, like the other reception rooms, has a large marble fireplace which may not be original to the house. The drawingroom on the other side of the hall has French windows out to the garden and doors opening on to the front porch. The family room opens into the garden on the other side of the house, and also into the kitchen.
It’s a bright modern kitchen with marble countertops, a tiled floor, under-floor heating, a Stanley range set into a brick surround, and a vaulted ceiling with exposed beams – and yet it feels a little dated, which says a lot about how rapidly fashions in kitchens change. It doesn’t, for example, have the current must-have, an island unit.
Upstairs are four bedrooms, three doubles and a single, two of them en suite. The main bedroom has a timber floor, timber fitted wardrobe and a fine en suite down three steps from the bedroom. This is a feature of the design – there are steps up and down in several of the rooms.
There’s a family bathroom off the wide landing, with tongue-and-groove timber half-panelled walls, bath and a bidet.
The garden is large, private and meticulously cared for. A raised stone patio opens down on to a large lawn; mature trees and hedges ring the garden’s edges; and there are raised flowerbeds and herbaceous borders. At the front, there is plenty of space for parking behind high electronic gates.
