Handsome 19th-century manor with development potential in Clonskeagh for €1.9m

A large Victorian house in a suburban cul-de-sac in Clonskeagh, Dublin 14, could appeal to a buyer who wants a large period home – or to a developer with an eye to building something on the 0.09-acre back lawn, which has a wide gate opening to Beechmount Drive.

Roebuck Manor was the home of the late Jan Kaminski, a Holocaust survivor who arrived in Ireland after the second World War and founded the Concorde Travel agency in the 1960s; he died in 2019. Now the house he bought in the 1970s, Roebuck Manor, Beechmount Drive, Clonskeagh, Dublin 14, a 484sq m (5,212sq ft) four-bed on 0.42 acres, is for sale through Lisney for €1,950,000. It has a BER of E1.

Beechmount Drive is a small cul-de-sac of detached 1960s-style houses built before Jan Kaminski bought Roebuck. Beechmount Drive is off Bird Avenue in Clonskeagh, near the junction with Dundrum Road.

Built around the 1860s, Roebuck Manor is a handsome house with many of its original features – elaborate ceiling cornicing, some centre roses, and marble fireplaces in the main reception rooms. In the past 20 years it has been somewhat modernised: bathrooms have been upgraded and there’s a bright, modern kitchen in an extension at the back.

There’s also a large basement area with outside access that could be revamped as separate accommodation, subject to planning permission – or linked to the main house again by reinstating a staircase to the front hall.

The two most striking rooms in Roebuck Manor are the drawing room and dining room at the right of the L-shaped front hall. The drawing room has a large marble fireplace with inset tiles, a timber floor and two tall sash windows: like the hall and dining room, it’s furnished with handsome period furniture.

(There’s also plenty of art on the walls and tall indoor plants throughout the house.) A door near the fireplace opens to the even larger dining room with a polished timber floor and a large triple-bay window.

This leads into the wide kitchen/breakfast room: the kitchen half of the room has a tiled floor and polished black granite worktops; the other half has a timber floor and a glass brick wall next to the dining table. There are floor-to-ceiling windows across the back of the space, with French doors opening to steps down to the back garden. Steep stairs from a corner of the kitchen lead down to a basement utility room.

There is a small, smart study on the left of the front hall with a sash window overlooking the front, and a downstairs toilet half-tiled with deep blue tiles.

Upstairs, past a tall arched landing window halfway up the stairs, there are four bedrooms. The large main bedroom, like the living room below it, is dual aspect and has a Jack-and-Jill en suite – with glossy deep blue tiles – shared with the double bedroom next to it. The two other bedrooms also have en suite bathrooms.

The basement, accessed from outside steps at the side of the house, has been partly restored, and has a kitchen, living room, bathroom and two bedrooms. But there’s evidence of some water ingress at the back, and money will need to be spent on the basement, says Lisney’s Robert Lawson.

There’s lots of parking space in the cobblelocked driveway at the front of the house; it shares access to The Stables, a small, separate house built at the side of Roebuck Manor, which is currently rented.

Roebuck Manor is not a protected structure and it’s possible a developer might seek permission to build a few houses or even apartments in the back garden: tall office buildings in Dundrum Business Park beside the back garden wall look down into the garden, which has vehicular access to Beechmount Drive.