Shamrock Lodge offers someone with deep pockets the chance to embrace country life whilst staying connected to the capital. For sale is a property in one or three lots – depending on your appetite for building and renovation.
The five-bedroom Regency house was built in 1835 and stands on gardens of about 3.32 acres. It is asking €580,000. Adjoining this lot is a three-acre plot zoned residential, asking €200,000, that abuts a housing estate called Rheban Manor. To the rear are three fields of farmland, comprising 13.6 acres and asking €270,000. Savills Country is the agent.
The property is hidden behind an imposing fence and is accessed via a set of wrought-iron regency gates that have been listed. It has been in the same family for the last 60 years and they breed Connemara ponies on the land.
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Herringbone parquet
The main house, which measures 350sq m/3,767sq ft, has Virginia creeper and Boston ivy adorning the front where, on a sunny day, a stained-glass fanlight casts washes of colour across the fine herringbone parquet floor of the hall.
An elegant staircase draws the eye up to the first-floor return and a small library screened off by a patio sliding door.
The house has a well-proportioned drawing room with dual-aspect windows, complete with shutters, streaming light into its warm polished floorboards and marble surround fireplace.
Across the hall is another space, a dining room that is also dual aspect, thanks to the glass door that leads through to the cedar conservatory, a structure that replaced the original smaller porch, a place that gets so much sun that the owners used to open the table umbrella to give them some shade. Doors on three sides lead outside.
To the rear of the dining room is a breakfast room that hasn’t changed much since the house was built save for the addition of a 1960s copper hood to the open fireplace.
It has a hatch that opens through to the kitchen, a room that is much rougher around the edges than the good rooms. It has a sizeable Aga that has been converted to oil and could, with some serious structural support, be opened up to incorporate the breakfast room and indeed the back kitchen and pantry across the hall.
Upstairs there are five bedrooms, with the three rooms to the front enjoying floor-to-ceiling windows. The master has a vaulted ceiling that may, in an earlier era, have been a drawing room. A shower en-suite bathroom is a later addition.
The house is an executor sale and needs modernisation including new windows.
As well as mature trees and grounds there are stables and cow sheds, the remains of a chicken run and piggery, all with scope to refurbish depending on the size of your bank balance.
The present owner would love to see the property remain as one lot. It is a beguiling offer for one lucky family – plenty of room to have a pony club all of its own.
The house is about a mile outside Athy town on the Kildare road. The town is on a commuter train line and is about 45 minutes to the M50.
