Victorian elegance by the People’s Park

When the owners of a period home facing the People’s Park in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, bought their house at auction for about €1.5 million in 2006, it needed major renovation: the house had been divided into units and the work took 18 months, even though the 1860s house was structurally sound.

The renovation was done very much in sympathy with its Victorian style. Much of the original cornicing and plasterwork was intact, along with features like a large marble fireplace in the drawingroom. Where replacements had to be made, they mirrored original features as much as possible – a marble fireplace in the sittingroom/diningroom looks very like the original across the hall. A decade later, Park View House, Park Road, Sandycove, Co Dublin, a 288sq m (3,100sq ft) five-bedroom house, is for sale for €1.795 million through Sherry FitzGerald.

Park View is an end-of-terrace house near the corner with the coast road, with views of the sea and the old Dún Laoghaire baths. A front door with an impressive fanlight opens into a porch and then into a porcelain tile floored-hall. The pale porcelain tiles are very Noughties, but the ornate plasterwork – ceiling coving, centre rose – and dado rails are all original.

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The house is elegantly decorated throughout in neutral shades with long drapes and period-style furniture. The cream-carpeted drawingroom on the left is a long, elegant room looking over the People’s Park through tall sash windows (with working shutters) at the front end and over the neat back garden at the back. The sittingroom/diningroom on the right of the hall, also dual aspect, has a reproduction Belle Cheminée marble fireplace with a gas fire.

Steps at the back of the hall lead down to the garden level, past a smart shower room on the return. Double doors with stained glass panels open into it. Downstairs, the oak-floored kitchen/breakfastroom from Robert Mooney Furniture, like the drawingroom above, runs the length of the house; it has cream units, a large Aga, a marble-topped island unit and counter-tops. French doors open into the garden at the back. There is also a comfortable family room at this level, a small utility room, double bedroom and guest toilet.

Double doors on an upstairs return open into a large family bathroom with a clawfoot bath and sanitary ware – as in the other bathrooms – from Fired Earth.

There are four double bedrooms upstairs, all with smart Robert Mooney fitted wardrobes. The home’s best views of the sea are from the two bedrooms at the front of the house: the wide main bedroom with two tall sash windows looks over the park and sea and as a small en suite off it. The bedroom beside it, decorated for the owners’ daughters, is pretty in pink.

Mews houses were built some time ago at the back of houses on Park Road. The remaining back garden is a decent size and has been nicely landscaped, with flowerbeds curving around the lawn.

Steps lead down to a gravelled space where there is parking for two cars behind a tall electronic gate off a laneway at the side of the house. There is also residents’ permit parking on Park Road.