TERENURE: €2.5M:Well-maintained four-bedroom Stringer-built family house

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, when the owners of Homestead, 19 Rathdown Park, Terenure, Dublin 6, bought it for £146,000, it made headlines. The price was heralded as an all-time high by the The Irish Times when it ran a story about the sale on May 26th, 1982.

Today it is a detached, comfortable, reassuringly cared-for house with large, lived-in rooms and an air of continuity. It comes on the market with an asking price of €2.5 million through joint agents Lisney and de Vere White Smyth.

The owners have never once regretted their original outlay and, major early work apart, have enjoyed updating it through the years, even recently adding two bathrooms.

It sits on a corner site on a road as comfortably settled and leafily sheltered as the house itself, and has four bedrooms, five reception rooms and 297sq m (3,200sq ft) of floor space, including a large attic playroom.

Built by Stringer in 1928/9, many of the original features – staircase, doors, picture rails, ceiling frieze rails – are intact. Original windows have been replaced by similar versions in hardwood and a bay window added to the extension makes for symmetry with an original bay.

The lowering of floors in the extension, which is to the side and back, created 11ft high ceilings and a soaring sense of space. Kitchen, dining and family rooms flow into one another, all of them overlooking the almost 0.25-acre of very green gardens back and front. The kitchen fittings, by the once very fashionable Arco, are of French oak. Both dining and family rooms have dark-beamed ceilings and a great deal of light from a front facing bay window and rear patio door to the garden.

The large entrance hallway, with a display shelf running close to the ceiling, polished oak floor and light through the leaded glass of the front door, gives a sense of the house’s origins. So do the formal drawing and diningrooms, running the width of the house and with ceiling friezes making another period statement.

A window at the turn on the stairs, leaded and with coloured glass, makes yet another. The bedrooms, two of them en suite, are off a squarish landing. The main one has a wide bay window and an en suite with separate bath and shower. The attic room has a pair of Velux windows and lots of eave storage.

A tarmac area to the front allows for plenty of parking space.

• Homestead, 19 Rathdown Park, Terenure, Dublin 6
• Agents:Lisney and de Vere White Smyth