Grandeur preserved at Monkstown Regency villa

The entrance hall of Albany Lodge, built about 1830 in Monkstown, Co Dublin, is the most striking aspect of this Regency villa. A small porch opens into a space with a large circular stained-glass skylight in a ceiling surrounded by intricate and beautifully painted plasterwork. Two pairs of long mirrors face each other across the hall and pillars flank the entrance into the downstairs hall, painted a warm yellow.

There’s another circular skylight over the stairway in the hall, where two striking blackamoor statues – apparently original to the house – bear lamps at the banister ends. Elaborate plasterwork friezes decorate the doorways, and it all adds up to a pretty palatial entrance to a handsome but relatively modest period house, where original features of the listed building have been well cared for.

The detached 358sq m (3,850sq ft) single-storey five-bedroom house on 0.37 of an acre on the corner of Albany Avenue and the busy Monkstown Road in Monkstown, Co Dublin, is for sale through Knight Frank, for €2.995 million.

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It’s a high price but reflects the location: two other houses on the road – which confusingly, like the house for sale, share the name Albany –  sold for more than €3 million in recent years. (The Albany, a pink Regency villa near the corner of Albany Avenue and the coast road, sold for €3.3 million in 2014. A huge modern house under construction in its front garden looks to be near completion. Nearby Albany House sold for €3.74 million in 2010.)

Refurbished bathrooms

To the left of the front hall is a sittingroom with a deep marble fireplace and two large interconnecting reception rooms, both with deep cornicing and painted a vivid peach pink. The drawingroom has three floor-to-ceiling sash windows in a bay overlooking the garden and a handsome marble fireplace matching one in the diningroom. Very wide double doors open into the diningroom, which is also bright, with two floor-to-ceiling windows. A door at the back of the diningroom opens into a small wetroom/pantry, and there’s a door from here into the garden.

One of Albany Lodge’s five double bedrooms is at the right of the front hall and has a very new and smart fully-tiled en suite bathroom. Six not very steep steps lead up – past the statues – to what’s described as the raised ground floor. There are three double bedrooms off the upstairs hall and a family bathroom. Two of the bedrooms are en suite, and all the bathrooms have been recently refurbished.

Nine steps lead down to the garden level of the house, where accommdation includes the kitchen/breakfastroom, a family room, TV room and the fifth double bedroom. The kitchen  is large and comfortable, but old-fashioned: new owners may want to reconfigure the garden level space, perhaps extending into the side of the house. An unusual aspect of the house is the large amount of storage space in a cellar that runs under the main reception rooms.

Manicured lawn

A door in the wall beside the house opens into Brighton Lane, which gives pedestrian access to Brighton Road. The entrance to Albany Lodge is through electric gates near the top of Albany Avenue: they open into a large gravelled driveway with room to park a number of cars. The large beautifully manicured lawn with a herbaceous border is mostly to the side of the house; there is also a large lawn to the front beside the driveway. A small gate lodge right on the corner of Monkstown Road and Albany Avenue – not included in the sale – has been concealed behind a high stone wall in the corner of the front garden.

Albany Lodge does not seem to have had many owners in its nearly 200-year history. It has been owned by one family since they bought it in 1978 and before that it was owned from 1908 by the Brittain family, who started Dublin’s Swastika laundries.