Publican’s home is ripe for a refurb

The family home of the late Ned Finnegan, a busy publican and well known owner of the Bottle Tower, the former County Club in Churchtown and Larry Murphy's on Baggot Street, is for sale. The five-bed detached house at 12 Green Park off Orwell Road in Dublin 14 is on a third of an acre of mature garden and will be auctioned by Sherry FitzGerald on October 1st with an AMV of €2 million. It is an executors' sale.

It was built by John Kenny, one of the busiest builders in Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s. He built large detached homes in Mount Merrion and Rathgar on Dublin's southside as well as the local authority estates on the northside in Marino and Cabra.

Green Park was built in the early 1930s when Kenny offered buyers a choice of eight styles of house on his nine-acre plot. He promised in his brochure that “no effort will be spared to see that the houses are well built, bright, homely and healthy”. He intended building many more houses in the cul de sac, but buyers bought multiple plots in order to have large gardens, with the result that there are now just 10 houses. They don’t come on the market very often.

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1970s renovation

The first owners of number 12 went for the second most expensive option – it was £2,300 and they probably spent more because they opted for one of the extras in the brochure, a garage. This detached house has 204sq m (2,200sq ft) and there is obvious potential to extend. This will probably happen as the new owners set about updating and modernising the family home which was lived in by the Finnegan family for 38 years.

Many of the original features went in the last renovation in the 1970s such as the panelled bedroom doors, and some fireplaces and original windows. That renovation included turning a dressingroom into an en suite bathroom complete with blue suite and floral 1970s tiles. It also involved extending the house at the back to enlarge the living room – the reception rooms in the house are not large – and the kitchen.

Eat-in kitchen

There are three reception rooms and – maybe not entirely surprisingly – a small bar wedged between the kitchen and the garage.

Upstairs there are five bedrooms. The largest, which is at the back of the house, has a feature marble fireplace and that colourful en suite.

The family bathroom was updated a couple of years ago with smart contemporary tiling and fittings and is probably the only room of the house which will remain untouched in the new owners’ renovation programme.

The eat-in 1970s kitchen overlooks the back garden. There’s also a utility room and downstairs guest toilet.

Some of the large detached houses in Green Park, which were also built by Kenny in the 1920s and 1930s, have been sympathetically updated and enlarged by new owners, something that is likely also to happen to number 12.

There’s off-street parking for a couple of cars and a double garage – although as new owners will probably seek to extend the house both at the side and the back, this may go during the renovation of the property.