A mews house backing on to the Metals, in Glenageary in south Co Dublin, is full of happy memories for Nollaig Greene: she and her husband, Ken, built 5a Arkendale Road in 1998, at the bottom of the garden of the house she grew up in, 5 Arkendale Road. Some years later she and her late parents, Norah and Michael Cleary, swapped homes as Nollaig's children grew.

Now Greene has put the 135sq m (1,450sq ft) three-bed detached house up for sale for €875,000, through Sherry FitzGerald.

Number 5a is a bright house, where interior doors are glazed, most walls are painted white and glazed doors open from three rooms at the back of the house into the garden. The Metals that it backs on to is the pedestrian path that runs high above the Dart line from Dalkey to Dún Laoghaire: there is the rumble of passing trains, but it’s not noticeable after a while, Greene says.

The house, tucked away at the end of a long gravelled driveway, is very private, well separated by tall walls from number 5, the large Victorian redbrick that is still Greene’s home.

The front door opens into a double-height entrance hall with a deep Velux over the stairs and a large porthole window. The layout of the house is simple: a living room on the right of the hall runs from the front to the rear of the house; a separate dining room is at the rear at the end of the hall. Rooms upstairs and down – apart from the kitchen and bathrooms – are floored with Junckers timber. The fairly modest kitchen has white units and white-tiled splashbacks; new owners may well decide to remove the partition wall between the dining room and kitchen and create a more modern, open-plan space.

A large conservatory at the side of 5a is Greene’s favourite room, a bright space (with remote-controlled electric blinds and electronically controlled roof window) opening into the wide back garden.

Upstairs are three modest-sized double bedrooms at the back of the house. The main bedroom has an open fireplace with an Orla Kaminska hand-painted tile surround, en-suite shower room off it and a walk-in wardrobe.

The garden at the back of the house is wide: a patio runs the width of the house, with steps up to the lawn, which is fringed with flower beds and mature trees. A high stone wall separates it from the Metals.

There’s lots of room for parking on the gravelled area at the front, where there’s also a large shed plumbed for a washing machine.

Glenageary Dart station is a five- or 10-minute walk via a pedestrian lane leading to the Metals near the end of the cul-de-sac.