The streets of Broadstone, in Dublin 7, form a lattice that, while close enough to the city centre to have been hipsterfied, retain the feel of a solid neighbourhood with a strong community spirit.
Marc Rafferty, the owner of number 26 Primrose Street, describes the area as “everything a city should be”. He says the hundred or so houses on the six streets immediately south of the Blessington Street Basin form a quiet little enclave, built in the 1890s and populated by people who work together and with the council to improve the area, adding bike-parking racks and community gardens.
To the west is the linear “urban connector” park along the canal bank walk that continues up to Phibsborough; it includes a playground, an astro pitch, a boxing club and lots of benches.
This all chimes with Rafferty’s philosophy; a co-founder of the vehicle-sharing company Go Car, he is an investor in and business development manager of the Goleen Harbour ecological project that includes accommodation, education, activities and farming. He is moving to the west Cork village to work full time on the enterprise and 26 Primrose Street is now on the market through Sherry FitzGerald, with an asking price of €395,000.
Coming into the house through the cheery red door, you swap grey skies for a patch of the Mediterranean, thanks to the sunflower yellow, cornflower blue and bright white colour scheme in the kitchen that faces the morning sun.
Rafferty bought the house 10 years ago and says this is the only change he made; all the renovation work was done by the previous owners, poet, playwright and arts journalist Vincent Woods and his wife, the award-winning costume and set designer Monica Frawley, who died last year and whose memory is held dear in the locality.
The ground floor is not quite open plan but the kitchen opens straight to the living room, and they are also linked by wooden floors. The fridge and a pantry are to the left, and behind this the couch fits snugly beneath the stairs. There is a stove set into the original cast-iron fireplace. The original back door leads into a utility lobby, and the bathroom is off this, lit by a Velux as well as a window.
The stairs lead from the living room to a landing off which are two double bedrooms with original cast-iron fireplaces. The front room spans the width of the house and two windows over the street as well as a Velux angled towards the chimney. The second also has lots of light, and built-in wooden cupboards. The high ceilings add to the feeling of space; there’s a lot packed into the 65sq m (700sq m). The attic, accessed by a Stira, is floored for storage and although it’s insulated the house has a low BER of E2.
French doors off the living room lead out to the L-shaped, southwest-facing paved town garden, with jasmine on the walls. If new owners decide to build on, there is compensatory green space at the end of the road, where Rafferty describes the Basin as a walled garden full of water and home to herons, swans and gulls.
As well as open spaces, there are plenty of local shops around, and the Mater Hospital and the TUD campus at Grangegorman, as well as the Luas at Broadstone, are close by.
