This 1930s house in Glenageary originally had white walls and light grey carpets – but one of its owners decided it needed oomph, so she started painting walls shades of dark grey, nearly black. Now it’s back to (almost) black everywhere in the stylish semidetached 290sq m (3,121sq ft) house full of quirky design. Some walls have textured grey-and-black wallpaper, there’s an all-black kitchen and Crittall steel-framed double-glazed windows and doors.
Now Wayside, Holmston Avenue, Glenageary, Co Dublin is for sale through Vincent Finnegan for €2.5 million. It’s a large house but has plenty of room to expand, with a 56m (183ft)-long back garden. It has a D2 Ber.
It’s surprisingly bright, given the dark decor, upstairs and down. Double Crittall glazed front doors open into a wide front hall floored with pale deal timber. It looks through a wide arch straight into the kitchen/diningroom at the back of the house, where floor-to-ceiling Crittall doors and windows look on to the back garden. The hall itself is a room, with a wood-burning stove at one side and a cosy corner with a chaise longue at the other.
The kitchen/diningroom is the most dramatic room in the house: open plan, it’s divided by a chimney breast with a wood-burning stove on the kitchen side. Floor-to-ceiling Crittall doors and windows stretch across the back wall, making the space bright. The streamlined all-black kitchen has a large Dekton-topped island unit: it’s bulletproof, says the owner, immune to damage from hot pans. A brightly decorated nook off one side of the kitchen with black-and-white tiled floor and small bay window is “my make-up room”, says one of the owners. There’s a good-sized utility room off it.
Other downstairs rooms include a livingroom on the left of the front door, a study and a family room on the right, all painted in dark shades. The family room, once the playroom for the owners’ three sons, has a beamed ceiling, part-panelled walls, a big TV and a bay window with the house’s original steel-frame windows. Walls in the study next door are all panelled and there’s an open fireplace. The livingroom is dual aspect, with tall Crittall windows on both sides looking into front and back gardens. It has all-panelled walls, a coal-effect gas fireplace and a handsome mantelpiece.
Textured black-and-grey wallpaper lines the walls of the stairwell. Upstairs, there are four bedrooms, a study with a Velux window that could be used as a bedroom, and a family bathroom. The large main bedroom is painted Farrow & Ball Mole’s Breath (a variation on its Elephant’s Breath) and has two windows – one a bay – overlooking the back garden. A smart en suite has a free-standing claw-foot bath, a step-in subway-tiled shower, pale tongue-and-groove timber floor, and a double sink set in an antique-style vanity unit. (The owner got this from Reverie, a now closed interiors shop in Sandycove – the bed came from here too.) A walk-in dressingroom is a good size.
A smart family bathroom has a large pale-grey tiled step-in shower; one of the bedrooms has a door opening into it.
The very long back garden is mainly in lawn, with high hedges on one side, a stone wall on the other. Towards the end is a gravelled seating area next to a tall open chimney, built during Covid when people could meet outdoors; there’s a covered barbecue area closer to the house. A large cherry blossom tree dominates part of the lawn and there’s a mature Scots pine at the side.
There’s lots of room to park in the gravelled front garden behind electronic gates. Another cherry blossom tree stands in the front garden. Virginia Creeper covers the front of the house: it flowers bright green in summer and its leaves turn red in the autumn, says the owner.
Holmston Avenue is a short, quiet road off Glenageary Road Lower, about halfway between Eden Road/Corrig Road and the Glenageary Road/Sallynoggin Road roundabout.
