One street back from the Grand Canal, in Dublin 8, Portobello Harbour runs from the corner of Richmond Row behind Portobello College to Lennox Place, with a few interesting terraces leading off it. One of these, Garden Villas, is accessed through a gate and a covered passageway beside number 13 Portobello Harbour, and this latter property is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald with an asking price of €675,000.
The terraced property, with a Ber of G, is in two units, with a separate apartment downstairs. Also accessed from the passageway, this has a shower room and galley kitchen in a flat-roofed extension, which opens to a small pebbled yard bounded by neighbours’ old walls and brightened by fresh white paint.
Inside, under the main part of the house, is the living-dining-bedroom with a window to the yard at the bed end and mirrors mounted to brighten the inner part.
The black front door of the main house opens directly from the street to the livingroom, which has a cast-iron fireplace and an engineered wooden floor. This opens through to the kitchen, with a range of fitted white units, a big ceramic sink and built-in oven.
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Upstairs in the 93sq m (1,001sq ft) property are three bright bedrooms, the first of which is at the back, by the bathroom. The main bedroom is a large double with two south-facing windows, and a second double room has built-in wardrobes.
As is the case elsewhere in the capital, there is a real dearth of rental accommodation in the area – at the time of writing, a search for rental properties in Portobello on myhome and on Daft yielded fewer than five properties, with two-beds going for up to €3,000 a month. A new owner could opt to keep number 13 and 13A as two units and continue to let one or both; or they could explore, with professional advice, how to reconnect them with an internal stairs.
This would restore access to the yard from the main house, which is affected by the current lack of access to the canalside public space while a hotel is under construction.
Dublin City Council is reviewing and discussing feedback from the recent public consultation workshops and exhibition of conceptual designs for Portobello Harbour, and once a preferred conceptual design is decided it will proceed towards the planning process.
In the meantime, the canal bank offers green space and a pleasant, segregated cycle path, and there are umpteen amenities around the corner on Lennox Street and elsewhere in neighbourly Portobello. A stroll past the Bretzel Bakery brings you to South Richmond Street, from where you can go south over the bridge to Rathmines village, or north along the streets that continue to the city centre, with added handiness from the Luas and many buses close by.
