IT’S THE kind of house that would have appealed to lots of Irish people in the years of the tiger: what’s more impressive than to have a house designed by starchitect Daniel Libeskind, with his trademark asymmetrical lines and soaring glass windows (looking a little bit like his Grand Canal Theatre, opening in Dublin’s south docklands two weeks from now)?
The Libeskind Villa, launched last autumn by German firm Proportion, is now being sold here by Christies Great Estates affiliate Sherry FitzGerald. It will be pretty exclusive – a limited edition of only 30 will be sold worldwide.
The 10/11m tall three-storey villa, built of wood and clad in zinc, is the very poshest kind of prefab and the €3 million price covers the cost of shipping and complete assembly on site.
What kind of site? It would fit comfortably on a quarter-acre says Sherry FitzGerald’s Philip Sherry: “It could make a huge amount of sense if you had a wreck of a house on a gorgeous site overlooking the sea, say in Dalkey, Killiney or Howth.”
You’d need to get planning permission, of course, but the fact that it has “sustainable” written all over it should help. The villa comes in two styles – “the warm, natural ‘Casual’, and the cool sculptural ‘Libeskind’,” according to Proportion. If you want see the showhouse, you’ll have to go to Locarno, Switzerland, where the prototype villa overlooks Lake Maggiore.
