Back in 2001, when Couleen came to market, Lisney withdrew it when it failed to reach its €323,783 asking price. If that looks like a strange amount, remember that we were only just getting our heads around the euro. The Irish punt price of £225,000 was a rounder figure.
It was the first time the charming cottage on Lower Glenageary Road, just steps from the People’s Park and the seafront at Dún Laoghaire, had been for sale since it was built in the 1930s. The site once belonged to Granite Hall, a Brontë-esque name for a big house if ever there was one. Granite Hall itself is long gone, though its name lives on in a small development of houses behind Couleen.
Couleen sold a year later, to the current owners who lived in the charming-but-tiny two bed cottage for five years before getting stuck into a full-on renovation and extension project. The owner shows me the original kitchen, now a handy utility room. “My husband is very tall, so the two of us could barely fit into it,” she says.
The couple added a second floor, adding two large en-suite doubles upstairs. They also demolished the garage and now there’s a large livingroom, big bright kitchen and double-height garden room downstairs. With a floor area of 185sq m (1,991 sq ft), the house has three bedrooms, all en-suite, or four if you take into account the spacious study/home office at the front of the house.
“There could be another bedroom too,” the owner says, showing me the very large main bedroom, which has views of Killiney Hill, the sea and Howth. “If you put in a partition wall here,” she gestures towards a line of floor-to-ceiling cupboards, “and move the door, there’s easily room to make this into two”.
With this kind of clever thinking, the couple’s choice to move on for a new project in the area make sense. “The kids are older and we have the energy for another one, so we can’t wait,” she says. Still it will be a wrench to leave the house, and the garden, “the second love of my life,” the owner says.
Garden room
We go outside, through the garden room via concertina doors leading directly on to a raised deck that catches the evening sun. There’s a small lawn, floral borders, a vegetable patch and a wendy house. There are also fruit trees – cherry, plum, pear and apple. A dish of apples from the garden sits temptingly on the dining table beside the kitchen. “I’m a farmer’s daughter you see,” says the owner in explanation, though it’s clear she has green fingers of her own.
There’s another bedroom downstairs, also en suite, which once happily housed au pairs, and is now a guest room. There is also lots of storage, and out front, enough room to turn a car around – handy on this road, plus ample off-street parking. The house is well insulated from traffic noise and the cold. For sale with Sherry FitzGerald for €995,000, it’s a fine proposition for a family.
