McNamara's Ailesbury Road home for sale at €12.5m

THE BUSINESSMAN Bernard McNamara, one of the central figures in the collapse of the property market, and his wife Moira are to sell their imposing Edwardian-style home at 22 Ailesbury Road in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.

The property is to be advertised for sale in this country and overseas by Sherry FitzGerald and Christie’s International, looking for €12.5 million.

The McNamara family are to remain in the seven-bedroom house until a buyer is found.

The sale will also include two adjoining derelict mews houses, also on Ailesbury Road, which are priced at €800,000 each.

Mr McNamara admitted last year that he was “broke” and that his companies owed about €1.5 billion.

He later resigned from more than 60 companies in his once vast property empire. The companies he resigned from included Donatex, which he used to invest in the disastrous Irish Glass Bottle site in the Dublin docklands.

Donatex and Mr McNamara are suing the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, which was a partner to the €412 million purchase of the site in 2006.

Mr McNamara and his company are seeking tens of millions of euro in damages. The Ailesbury Road house stands on over an acre of mature grounds and backs on to Wanderers Football Club.

The original house at 22 Ailesbury Road, previously occupied by the Japanese embassy, was demolished by Mr McNamara in the late 1990s.

He also bought the house next door, number 24, and used part of its gardens to enlarge his own grounds, before selling it off.

The new three-storey house with over 1,486 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of floor space was designed by architect Brian O’Halloran and completed over a decade ago.

Although period style on the outside, inside it is a lavish modern house with at least five reception rooms and including a vast entrance hall, a lift and an indoor swimming pool which, covered with a transparent glass cover, can be turned into a dance floor.

The last major house sale in Dublin 4 – on the more expensive Shrewsbury Road – was financier Derek Quinlan’s expensively fitted-out semi-detached house at number 6, which made in the region of €7 million.

It was sold by Sherry FitzGerald.

Savills are seeking about €5 million for 91 Ailesbury Road, another double-fronted, 520sq m house at the opposite end of Ailesbury Roadto the McNamara house.