A painstaking recreation on Waterloo

Five years of hard labour, and two years with no kitchen, have paid dividends, writes EDEL MORGAN

BALLSBRIDGE: €1.15M

EIGHT years ago, when the owners bought 73 Waterloo Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, they lived in one room while renovating the rest piece by painstaking piece. They survived on microwave meals for two years until the kitchen was finished but their quest for perfection paid off. The end result, which took five years of hard labour, is a house that shows an impressive attention to detail.

Sherry FitzGerald is asking €1.15 million for the 275sq m two-storey over garden level terraced house, which has a self-contained two-bedroom flat in its basement.

The drawingroom and diningroom are magnificent, with high ceilings, ornate plasterwork (all but a small corner restored), big sash windows and marble fireplaces – the latter aren’t original but don’t look out of place in this 1852 house, believed to be one of the oldest on Waterloo Road.

At the end of the elegant half-panelled main hall, there’s a kitchen with hand-painted cream and taupe kitchen presses and a porcelain-tiled floor. A kitchen counter marks the border into a cosy area with a wood-burning pot-belly stove and a built-in window seat overlooking the garden.

From here a door leads out on to a Victorian-style tiled terrace and a staircase down to the garden, which can also be accessed from the basement.

There’s a big bathroom on the first-floor return that was once a bedroom. It has a re-enamelled Victorian rolltop bath, a separate shower, twin basins, a sash window and a cast-iron fireplace. This means there are only two bedrooms upstairs. The main bedroom spans the width of the house and has ceiling coving, a cast-iron fireplace and sash windows with shutters.

When you come out of the bedrooms on the main landing, the first thing you see is a dazzling stained-glass window with vivid blue, green, yellow and red panels, which is original to the house. This is the not the only example of exquisite stained glass – the fanlight over the hall door is a vibrant yellow and blue.

There’s a third bedroom with an en suite at garden level and a passageway with lots of cleverly concealed storage. The two-bedroom apartment is also at garden level. It is partitioned from the main house, so a new owner would have the option of knocking this entire level into one . The apartment has a cleverly designed grey gloss kitchen, where the presses are cut to fit the sloped ceiling, which leads into a dining room with an exposed brick wall. It also has its own tiled patio area in the garden. The rental potential is around €1,200 per month.

To the rear there’s a tranquil garden with a goldfish pond and a tiled pathway leading to a lawn fringed by luxuriant foliage including wisteria, peony rose, honeysuckle and bamboo plants. Silver birch gives the garden a feeling of privacy while letting the light filter through. The front garden is mainly gravelled with parking for two cars.

73 Waterloo Road, D4Renovated three-bed with self-contained two-bed flat

Agent:Sherry FitzGerald