NOT MANY houses have bookshelves made by German prisoners of war, but Cuil Aluinn, a six-bedroom house high on Killiney Hill Road, Co Dublin, has that distinction, or so the story goes.
Cuil Aluinn’s history and fantastic views over the treetops to Killiney Bay are among its most compelling features. The house, which has a third of an acre of gardens and has been in the same family for more than 60 years, will be auctioned on July 11th by Daphne L Kaye, quoting an advised minimum value of €650,000.
The driveway up to the house is flanked by garden on a number of levels. At the end close to the entrance gate is a kitchen garden, while the next garden up is laid in lawn with colourful planting.
At the front there’s a little lawn with garden seat and a bird’s eye view over the garden with its sycamore, eucalyptus and ash trees, fuschia and lemon-scented verbena, old rose bushes and fig trees. To the left is Killiney Hill and the obelisk, and out in front, the bay.
There are steps and a pathway up to the detached house, which is in need of complete renovation. Various owners over the past 150 years have added extensions to the building, which is a mix of styles. The white flat-roofed modernist part was built about 70 years ago by the then owner, Dutch travel journalist Kees Van Hoek.
One of the rooms he added, a box-shaped sunroom-cum-library, has fitted wooden shelves which the family who own it say were made by German POWs being detained in the Curragh during the second World War.
There’s a parquet-floored entrance hall in the Van Hoek part of the house and two bedrooms, one of which is a double room with some of the best views in the house over to Enya’s Manderley Castle and Bray Head. In the oldest part of the house, built 200 years ago, there’s a dining room. Off this there’s a sitting room leading to a greenhouse-cum-conservatory.
The kitchen is a vast space featuring an Aga. The bathroom, estimated at 150-years-old, has recently had a shower and a Velux window added. Another room used as an artist’s studio could be used as a bedroom. Upstairs there are two double bedrooms. A concrete shed in the garden sports the same white and yellow trim as the house.
Cuil Aluinn
Description: detached six-bed with third of an acre of gardens
Agent: Daphne L Kaye
