Sandycove Edwardian with strong legal pedigree for €3.5m

A house with a legal pedigree in Sandycove, Co Dublin, is a striking Edwardian that's brighter than many homes of that era. It was once the home of Ireland's chief justice, Tom O'Higgins, and before that the home of former attorney general Charles Casey. The current owners moved into Jerpoint on Elton Park in 1989 and have retained it in meticulous condition.

A very large bright entrance hall decorated in warm cream shades opens through wide double doors into a drawingroom with a triple-bay window to the front. Edwardian features – quarry tiled verandahs front and back, large timber fireplaces with decorative tiles inset, stained glass windows, a handsome staircase, stripped polished pine floors – are all in excellent condition. Outside, the owner’s son, a landscape architect, has fashioned a beautiful rear garden where sculpted trees border a wide green lawn.

Now Jerpoint, a 362sq m (3,900sq ft) five-bedroom detached house built in 1907 on Elton Park, Sandycove, Co Dublin, near the corner with Dundela Park, is for sale through Lisney for €3.5 million.

The front hall of Jerpoint – with a very attractive decorative plasterwork ceiling – is a room in itself: the owner’s daughter remembers having 18 friends for dinner there when her parents were away. The layout is perfect for entertaining, with the exceptionally wide entrance from the hall leading into the interconnecting drawingroom and diningroom running from the front to the back of the house. Like the drawingroom, the diningroom has a triple-bay window too.

Quarry-tiled floor

There’s a cosy family room off the front hall too, with bookshelves on either side of a fireplace with a mahogany surround. The kitchen/breakfastroom at the back of the house has its original quarry-tiled floor and a pre-1948 reconditioned oil-fired Aga. Updated a few years back, it also has black polished granite and butcher block worktops and a de Dietrich induction hob .

A sliding glass door opens from the kitchen on to a patio in the rear garden and 13 steep steps lead up to a hidden maid’s room, now used for storage. It’s not the only hidden room: on the upstairs landing, seven stairs lead up past a new bathroom to another small attic room that might once have been a maid’s room, but could now be a tucked-away study.

The new bathroom is a touch of luxury, with a bath surrounded by grey marble tiling, grey-tiled floor and a mirror (heated to avoid steaming) set into a timber-panelled wall.

There are five double bedrooms off the top landing, two at the front with views straight down the road in front towards the Joyce Tower, the sea and Howth. The bedrooms are all well-decorated, some with period features such as handsome fireplaces.

But new owners wanting to update, by creating an en suite and maybe a dressingroom in the main bedroom, for example, might consider extending the house at the side. Agent Rory Kirwan points to the base of a former conservatory at the side of the house opening off the livingroom downstairs and suggests that a double-height extension could work there.

There’s plenty of parking to the front of the house. At the back, next to a landscaped lawn, there’s space for a number of outbuildings and a vegetable garden.