Ballsbridge - €3.25m:There's a lot that's unique about Rowlands, a bright, contented house in the Shrewsbury development in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.

Securely inside the gates and to all intents and purposes an integral part of Shrewsbury, Rowlands is in fact a one-off "designed and physically built" by the vendor on family land with an empathy which came from growing up on the site.

Owner Ed Martin's original family home is on Merrion Road and Rowlands was built in its back garden, which had access to the RDS-owned land purchased by the Cosgraves more than a dozen years ago for the now leafily maturing development.

The original Rowlands has been refurbished and added to in the last two years to become a fully equipped, stylish family home with a diningroom and gym integral to an open-plan design which usefully uses all of the 267sq m (2,880sq ft) floor area.

There are three bedrooms - two en suite - four reception rooms, large kitchen/breakfastroom and floors of creamy Italian marble picking up the natural light. Rowlands, with an AMV of €3.25 million, will be auctioned by Lisney on March 12th.

There's an expansive feel as you go through the front door, the house opening ahead to the back garden and upwards to the Velux-lit gallery-like gym.

As in all the best homes, the most used area is the kitchen, the breakfastroom part of which is large enough for a table which comfortably feeds 12 to 14 diners.

Arches over the wide windows overlooking the garden are picked up in a similar curve leading to the small family room.

The diningroom has a nice, dining-hall feel to it with olive-coloured walls and a floor of 9-inch wide American walnut planks.

Windows, as everywhere in Rowlands, are a feature in the livingroom and take up two walls. Split-level, the lower livingroom level surrounds a brick fireplace which has an old railway sleeper as its mantel.

A state-of-the-art ground floor bedroom is in shades of grey, the main bedroom has a walk-in dressingroom as well as an en suite, and a third, large bedroom takes up the width of the house.

The back garden has a landscape of many welcoming curves, with a wide variety of green from bamboos to shrubs and, by way of mulch, lots of lovely blue-black Bangor pebbles.