This week: Celbridge
Number 19 Beatty Grove, Celbridge is a three-bed semi-detached house in excellent condition in one of the many housing estates ringing this Co Kildare village that has become an established suburb of Dublin since the first housing estate was built there nearly 25 years ago.
The 10-year-old house has been extensively refurbished by its owners, who bought it three years ago, and is now on the market for about £105,000 through local agent Michael McHale.
The 1,050-sq-ft property is in pristine condition. The whole downstairs area has solid timber floors. A good-sized sittingroom opens off the hall, and double doors open from this room into a bright, spacious kitchen/diningroom. The kitchen area has a tiled floor, fully-tiled splashback, timber ceiling with sunken spotlights, fitted timber units and integrated appliances. There is a downstairs lavatory in the hall.
There are three-bedrooms - two freshly decorated doubles and a small single with a Winnie the Pooh theme - and a bright blueand-white bathroom with half-tiled walls. There are polished timber floors in the bathroom and bedrooms. There is a plentiful supply of second-hand houses - some over 20 years old, some only built a year or two ago - in this commuter village, ranging in price from around £90,000 up to about £120,000. (The basic price of new homes in the area is about £99,000 for two-bed terraced homes, £115,000 for a three-bed semi.)
This makes it a good hunting ground for first-time buyers, especially those willing to consider buying a second-hand house. It seems a less extreme option than commuting all the way to Kinnegad or Mullingar or Carlow to buy a new house in a similar price range.
For example, Douglas Newman Good, which opened an office in Celbridge a year ago, has two four-bed houses, numbers 150 and 160 The Grove, both for sale for £115,000-plus. This estate off the road to Ardclough was built about 15 years ago, and like many of the estates in the area, has generous green space. Number 150 is opposite such a space. Both have attractive redbrick fronts, comfortable livingrooms with double doors to a diningroom, and upstairs, two double and two single bedrooms. Number 160 The Grove has opted to turn the diningroom into a separate sittingroom, closed off from the kitchen/breakfastroom, while in number 150, the same space is an open-plan kitchen/diningroom. Both have decent-sized walled rear gardens.
Celbridge is a village very like Maynooth just four miles away, with the obvious exception that it has no university. The Celbridge/ Leixlip exit off the N4 motorway leads down a long stretch of road over a hump-backed bridge across the Liffey into the single long main street. At one end are the gates to the long tree-lined driveway to Castletown House, now undergoing extensive refurbishment by the Office of Public Works; at the far end, past the converted mills that is now a community/small business centre, is Celbridge Abbey, an attractive amenity with a tea rooms, garden centre, and extensive walks by the Liffey. (It was once the home of Swift's Vanessa.) The main street needs, and is soon to get, a facelift, with funds allocated to be spent on cobblelocking pavements and re-surfacing the road.
Like Maynooth, the village has become a suburb of Dublin since Castletown, the first estate, was built there in 1976. Agent Michael McHale bought his house there when it was brand new, and still lives in the estate. At the time, the population of the village was 4,000; now, he reckons it to be about 18,000. It has coped with this population explosion, and is still coping, as development continues. Agent Pat Behan of The Property & Mortgage Centre agency in the village estimates that some 1,000 more houses are still to be built in estates like St Raphael's and Temple Manor. And more land is likely to be zoned for housing in the near future, after the draft plan for county Kildare is adopted. Says McHale, if you see a green field, you have to assume it's going to be built on.
Up to now, at least, the area has retained its villagey, country atmosphere, despite the relentless spread of three and four-bed semi-d estates, and the area doesn't have the somewhat soulless feeling of Lucan South, cut off from its village by the motorway. As in Naas, the estates are spread on all sides of the village, on roads branching out from the main street to Maynooth, Clane and Naas, with the village still more or less the centre of the area. There are three primary schools, including a new multi-denominational school, and several second-level schools.
There is a large new GAA clubhouse, a tennis club, and sports and other activities based in the community centre. Most residents shop in a Quinnsworth on the fringe of the village, or at a Superquinn down the motorway in nearby Lucan.
And especially for people living near the main street, the grounds of Castletown House are a wonderful amenity. One woman enjoys access to the grounds via a back entrance; Michael McHale says that walking his dog along the banks of the Liffey in the grounds keeps him sane.
Castletown itself is an interesting estate of about 600 houses, entered to the left just beyond the gates of Castletown House, in grounds once belonging to it. Built over 20 years ago, it has nods in the direction of its Georgian heritage. An original redbrick gazebo, for example, stands incongruously in the middle of the usual confusing network of suburban roads, housing a newsagents. And one corner, known as The Walled Gardens, backs on to what was once Castletown House's orchard, so that some of its houses have a very high old brick wall at the bottom of their gardens - this is the case with 39 The Walled Gardens, a three-bed 950-sq-ft semi for sale for about£90,000 through Michael McHale. Other houses have a kind of Georgian ribbon motif on their suburban facades.
There is, of course, a fly in this ointment, and no one will be surprise to hear that it is the traffic; ask anyone in the town what their biggest headache is, and they will tell you that it is getting through the main street and over the bridge that leads to the road to the motorway at rush hour. A soon-to-open link road from the Willowbrook/Thornhill estate to the Dublin Road should ease traffic on the street. The 13-mile journey to Dublin's city centre takes about 25 minutes outside of rush hour, and from an hour to an hour and a half between about 7.45 am and 9 am. There is a 20-minutes-to-town Arrow train service from Hazelhatch station nearby, with a feeder bus serving it, and a fairly infrequent Dublin bus service, the number 67A. A number of private busses also travel to the city at rush hour.
Most agents agree that the market in Celbridge has begun to move since Christmas, with demand from Dublin first-time buyers very strong. Investors have never played the same part in this market as in Maynooth, although there is demand for rented accommodation from people working in nearby Intel and Hewlett Packard. Nonetheless, agents like McHale predict that prices will start to rise quite quickly over the next few months because of demand.
