A PRICE in the region of £2.5 million is being quoted for St Helen's House, the Georgian house overlooking the Stillorgan dual carriageway in Co Dublin, which is to be sold by tender on November 29th.

Joint selling agents, Gunne and Jones Lang Wootton, have launched a marketing campaign to find a buyer for the house following the granting of planning permission to convert and extend it for use as a 150-bedroom hotel.

The house and 4.45 acres are owned by Berland, which recently sold an adjoining site for apartments following the resolution of a dispute in the firm.

An Bord Pleanala has cleared the way for a four-storey extension and for the provision of a leisure centre. The sunken gardens to the north of the house and the woodlands to the east are to be retained as open space.

The agents say that apart from its obvious potential for a luxury hotel, the building could also be used as an embassy or for educational purposes.

The house is most likely to be used for a hotel because of the boom in the hotel industry over the past year. A range of new hotels has opened in Dublin in the past 12 months and many more are planned in the expectation that tourism numbers will continue to grow.

Berland originally secured planning approval for a 101-bedroom hotel in 1990 but the project did not go ahead because of a depression in the hotel market.

The company later failed to get planning permission to build a three-storey block on each side of the house for 95,000 square feet of offices.

Five years ago, Dun Laoghaire Corporation described St Helen's as "perhaps the finest house in the borough".

It has lost some of its gloss since then, but it still has a number of impressive reception and function rooms with period features including ornate marble and plasterwork.