A lush garden on a third of an acre and excellent sea views are the two most striking aspects of a house on Killiney Hill Road, home to one family for the past 49 years. The couple bought Reenrour, a Victorian semidetached house, for €29,000 in 1973 and made improvements over the years. For instance, they added a spiral staircase to reconnect the ground floor to garden-level accommodation, creating two new bedrooms, and 24 years ago they had a new kitchen installed. It was re-roofed in 2022 and has a Ber of G.
Now Reenrour, a 265sq m (2,852sq ft) five- to six-bedroom house, is for sale for €1.75 million through Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty. The house has some fine period features but needs renovation. One of the owners suggests that if she were renovating now, she might create a new open-plan space at garden level, possibly moving the kitchen there.
The drawingroom and the main bedroom above it have the best views from the house; both have tall, wide bay windows looking over Killiney Bay. Reenrour is roughly halfway down Killiney Hill Road, down a steeply sloping driveway that widens out next to a railed patio/car-parking space looking over the sea. The well-tended garden, a series of separate lawns, slopes down steeply from here to a gate that opens on to Strathmore Road, a short walk from Bono’s house.
Reenrour’s neighbour is Palermo, the house that was owned by the late antiques dealer Louis O’Sullivan; the families each had four children, and a hole in the hedge allowed them to play freely in each other’s gardens. Palermo was sold in 2019 for €2.85 million.
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The front door at the side of Reenroe opens into a conservatory-style lobby, then into the front hall, both timber-floored. The imposing drawingroom is on the left; painted terracotta, it has handsome cornicing painted white and gold. One of the owners painted the egg-shaped parts of the cornice gold herself some years ago, “using a nail polish brush and gilt”. There’s a gilt-framed mirror over a wide black marble mantelpiece and an open fire. Best of all are its views of the sea from the tall bay windows.
On the other side of the hall is a timber-floored diningroom, and through studded double doors a kitchen cum breakfastroom, which is modest-sized with a vivid red wall, Velux window and modern timber units. It has a quarry-tiled floor and glazed double doors to the front garden. There’s a toilet and a utility room off it.
A steep spiral staircase in the front hall leads down to the garden level. The hall here has a tiled floor and a wall of jazzy wallpaper. The family room, with parquet floor and a fireplace with a raised hearth, opens off it. There were plenty of parties held here and on the patio outside say the owners. Two bedrooms open off the family room and downstairs hall: both have floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors opening on to the back patio. One has the original granite wall – the bedrooms were added on to the side of the house – and one has an en suite part-tiled shower room off it. There’s a utility room down here, too.
Upstairs, there’s a single bedroom on the return, used now as an office. There are two double bedrooms on the first floor, with another attic room up a few stairs from the top landing, and a family bathroom. The main bedroom looks over the garden to the sea; you can see Bray Head to the right, a sliver of Dalkey Island past trees on the left and glimpse the rooftop of the lavish new property built on the site of the former Canadian embassy residence on Strathmore Road. The view is broken by a tall eucalyptus at the bottom of the garden; it’s protected under planning law, the owners discovered, when they considered cutting it down recently.
Outside, the gardens are steeply tiered and rich with trees, bushes and plants, including rhododendron and hydrangeas, and the lawns are divided by hedges and a series of steps lead down and around the garden. A gate at the bottom opens on Strathmore Avenue, the road linking Killiney Hill Road to Vico Road.
There’s good room to park in the paved front of the house, where the owner has created an attractive display of flowers at the foot of a tall tree.
