The owner of an early Victorian house near Sandymount Green fell in love with Sandymount over 30 years ago. She and her husband had lived in Malahide since getting married and were renting temporarily in Ballsbridge, planning a move to be nearer town when their children were in college. “I never knew until then that there was a village in Sandymount.”
They decided to sell a house they’d already bought elsewhere in Dublin and went to see a local auctioneer: soon after, they were shown Stonehaven, the five-bed on Claremont Road she has lived in since 1987. She liked the quirky features of the house, built in the 1830s, and its setting, a few minutes’ walk from Sandymount Green. For a time, she ran it as a guest house, described in the Rough Guide as “a cosy, ivy-clad Victorian townhouse, well-maintained by its friendly owner”.
Now the 215sq m (2,314sq ft) five-bed is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald for €1.25 million.
A virtual tour of the house shows how the house was adapted to be able to take in guests – each of the bedrooms has a small shower en suite – and new owners will pretty certainly want to revamp and modernise Stonehaven.
Sherry FitzGerald agent Maxine Pilkington describes it as one of the prettiest houses in Sandymount, “well-known because it’s just off the Green”. The house faces toward the Green, down a short path off Claremont Road.
The yellow front door opens off a tiled entrance hall with a lovely centre rose. Other period features in the house include a stained-glass window in the upstairs landing. The dining room opens off the right of the hall at the front, with the drawingroom behind it at the back. Both have sash windows; the drawing room has a cast-iron fireplace with tiles inset and coving.
There is a family room to the left of the front hall at the front. A separate study/office beside it has its own front door. The kitchen/breakfast room is at the end of the front hall, opening into the garden, and there’s a utility room and a bathroom off the back hall.
Upstairs, the main bedroom at the front of the house, over the dining room, has three windows. There’s another large bedroom at the back, over the drawing room, and three more bedrooms: all five have the guest-house style en suites. The owner ran her B&B up to about a decade ago. “Guests always said it had a lovely, homely atmosphere.”
The very private rear garden is divided between a patio and a raised lawn. There’s room to park at the front, and potential to build another car space at the side of the house, subject to planning permission.
An adjacent but separate house, number 7, at the end of the path leading to Stonehaven’s front door, was the home of the previous owner’s grandmother, who married the boy next door at number 9 in the late 19th century.
