Redesigned Sandymount home that bucks open-plan trend in favour of peace and privacy for €1.6m

One of the owners of number 201 Strand Road in Sandymount is a town planner and has strong ideas about residential design and layout. So in redesigning the 1960s house she and her husband bought in 2014, for €985,000, she had reservations about the trend to make everything in the house open plan. “Noise levels can be horrific,” she says, especially in a home like this with three children.

In the complete revamp, they put a wall between what had been an open-plan livingroom/diningroom in the 1960s house: now double doors open into a room on the left of the front hall that she calls a parlour, although it’s named a drawingroom in the agent’s brochure. “There’s no media allowed here, no radio, no TV,” she says. It’s nothing like an old-fashioned parlour of course: the walls are panelled, coving and a ceiling rose has been installed and an open fireplace is filled from top to bottom with neatly stacked logs, an idea the owner took from an interiors magazine. It’s decorated, like many rooms in the house, in neutral shades of greige (grey mixed with beige), with silvery drapes framing the window.

Although the owners bucked some trends, they did expand the house at the rear, knocking down ad hoc extensions to create a 65sq m (700sq ft) open-plan kitchen/diningroom with a snug livingroom off it at one side and off another, a children’s playroom.

The B2-rated semi-detached four-bed house, extending to 203sq m (2,185sq ft), was built in 1962 near the Merrion Gates end of the Strand Road and is now on the market through Sherry FitzGerald seeking €1.6 million.

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Newly-installed arched double doors framed by a brick arch open into the hall of the house; like most of the rest of the ground floor, it’s floored with smoked oak. On the right is a small but well-fitted-out home office. Previous owners had converted a garage on this side of the house into a long room: again, the current owners created a wall between the office and new rooms behind it. The office has a wide built-in desk, lots of shelves and cupboards, grey-panelled walls and Luxaflex white privacy blinds on wide windows overlooking the front.

Beyond the stairs on the right of the hall is the other part of the original room; there’s a wine press next to a boot room, where there’s good space to hang coats and a small prettily-decorated WC. Opposite is a very useful part-tiled laundry room created out of the original kitchen; it has lots of space for a washer and dryer, a sink with a bar to hang shirts over it, storage presses, room for a clothes horse and door to the side of the house. A corner cupboard is the house’s tech centre – the house has full HDMI cabling and is wired for CCTV and coaxial video distribution.

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Double doors at the end of the hall open on to two steps down into the kitchen/diningroom at the back of the house. It is floored with smoked oak and has underfloor heating. The space is bright, with a large atrium roof light over the dining table and a large quartz-topped island; a mirror behind the Rangemaster, set into the countertop on the right, reflects light back into the room. There’s a window seat in a box bay window at the end and three sets of glazed double doors opening on to the back garden. The Dart line runs directly behind the garden wall, but glazed doors/windows muffle the sound effectively.

This extension is different from the more standard large open-plan spaces; two steps at one side of the kitchen lead up to a livingroom that the owner calls a snug – it’s the other half of the front parlour/drawingroom. “It’s most definitely my favourite room in the house,” she says. It has dark brown walls, recessed lights, a wood-burning stove in the fireplace and lots of comfy sofas. A room off the kitchen at the opposite end is a playroom that has been adapted as the family’s children grew: there are steps up to a small child-sized mezzanine platform equipped with bean bags and a TV (panels keep it safe). Below it is room for a wide desk, where the children were homeschooled during Covid-19.

Upstairs, there are three smartly-decorated double bedrooms, one single and a family bathroom. Double doors open into the main bedroom; it has a wall of mirror-fronted wardrobes and an en suite which is mostly tiled and has a walk-in shower.

Outside, there’s a good-sized patio in the back garden next to an artificial grass lawn bordered by mature shrubs and trees (that mostly screen-passing Darts). A shed – or pod, as the owner calls it – at the bottom of the garden is used as a gym and storeroom.

There’s room to park several cars in the gravelled front garden behind an electronic gate. Access to Strand Road has been restricted in recent months by works being done by Irish Water. These are due to finish imminently, says the owner, when the road will return to a two-way system. She doesn’t anticipate that changing again, at least not in the short term, as Dublin City Council will likely have to seek planning permission if they want to go ahead with a cycle-lane plan.