Survival of a street

TO fully appreciate just how much of an achievement the preservation of North Great Georges Street in inner city Dublin is it's a good if depressing idea to take a stroll along its near neighbour, Lower Dominick Street.

Both streets were laid out and built nearly 200 years ago, both were lined with impressive Georgian red brick houses in terraces on either side and both suffered the same fate, falling out of fashion when the Georgian beau monde followed the Duke of Leinster and moved south of the Liffey. But while Dominick Street is a decrepit shadow of its former glory, a stroll up the gentle incline of North Great Georges Street on a crisp winter morning shows a majestic street which retains a sense not just of architectural completeness but of its grand history. It is true that at the lower end of the street, demolition took away houses that have since been replaced with a newly built Georgian pastiche style apartment block, but the rest of the street looks as it must have done when the streets in Dublin's inner city were the place to live for the city's legal eagles and wealthy merchants. That the street survived at all is down to a fortunate mix, of historical circumstance and the work" of a group of individuals who bought,", into the street nearly 20 years ago.

At one Dublin city council meeting: in the early 1980s they were called the "gin and tonic set" - a name which still amuses the dogged band of new owner occupiers who have spent years restoring several of the houses in the street. Some of the first pioneers are well known - Easons's Harold Clarke, who shocked all his friends by selling up a suburban residence in 1967 and buying number 19 for the then horrifyingly high sum of £5,000; Senator David Norris, who became a tireless champions' of the street; and Desiree Short, a china: restorer who completely preserved and now runs her successful business from her famously decorative and much photographed home.

These Northside pioneers paved the way for a second group of equally determined Georgian homeowners.

Nabil Saidi, who bought his house in 1988 as a 40th birthday present to himsell, gives some indication of the mammoth, full time task of restoring one of these large houses' by laughingly calling himself a "housekeeper". An expert in middle Oriental manuscripts, Nabil had never even lived in Dublin until he came across the house while house hunting for a friend. "I never intending living in Dublin or even buying the house but when I saw it, I had to have it, and that was it," says the native Mancunian who worked in Sothebys in London for 20 years. "One of my first impressions was that the house had such a big front door and hallway," he says, revealing that like all the other owner occupiers he obviously had more vision than sense - most prospective buyers would have fled at the sight of the caved in roof and the rain pouring down through the ceilings.

As well as needing a new roof - for which secondhand slates and 25 vintage chimney pots had to be found - the entire top floor had to be rebuilt and "in terms of scale, if you can imagine, it was exactly like building a bungalow," says Nabil, whose long list of urgent tasks included repainting the brickwork: and replacing the windows.

The house had been divided into several small flats and as the elderly tenants died, their rooms were simply sealed up by the landlady. "Opening up the rooms when I bought the house had a strange Miss Havisham quality," he says, "many were filled with the old tenants entire personal effects, including their clothes and photographs: it was very sad really."

Before the real business of restoration could begin, layers and layers of wallpaper and lino had to be removed as well as the many makeshift partitions one of the main reception rooms was divided into a three roomed flat. "The subdivisions worked in my favour in that when they were put up they left most of the cornices, fireplaces and original doors intact."

His method of restoring the house, which at roughly 5,000 square feet is several times as big as your average suburban home, is not to methodically go through it room by room but instead work through the house subject by subject. All the woodwork, for example, has recently been finished.

The effect can be slightly disconcerting in that even after more than 10 years the main rooms and hallway are not fully completed, but there is a definite method in the apparent madness - "once you get a team of expert woodwork restorers or whatever in to do some work, it makes sense to keep them until every inch of woodwork is finished - that way you don't have to spend ages trying to get them back," says Nabil, echoing the frustrations of anyone who has attempted even the most modest of renovations.

He believes the entire house has to be lived in and used. His kitchen is still in the basement - that way it forces me to go downstairs: in a house this big it would be too easy for someone like me who lives alone to live in just a room or two". He also opens it up to the public on occasion. Last month, artist Brian McCarthy had the most atmospheric of venues for his one man show - his canvases were hung against the cracked plaster and faded paintwork of Nabil's first floor reception rooms and candles lit the way for the 100 or so" people who attended the wonderfully gothic opening night.

Across the street, another of the owner occupied houses is also fully lived in - in this case by several people. Twelve years ago, having lived in a flat on the street for some years, architect David Murray and Brian Walsh, a programme assessor for RTE, decided the only way they were each going to be able to buy the type of large apartments they wanted was to get together with some other friends and buy one of the houses.

It didn't exactly work out that way - it proved more difficult pinning friends down to the arrangement than first envisioned, but in the end the pair happened on an investor who was interested in buying into the house and developing some rentable apartments. The resulting arrangement is that Brian and David have a very large apartment each - each takes up a complete floor - and the investor has four smaller apartments.

"None of the apartments is less than, 900 square feet - and they also have high ceilings and wonderful Georgian features," says Brian (other inner city apartments measure much, much less the latest Temple Bar development featured apartments of 430 square feet for £77,000).

"Legally, buying a house with a group of people is not that tricky," he says, and technically you have to do things like put in firebreaks between the floors, but other than that, it's not really that big a deal." The main problem for the initial pioneers in the street was insurance - 10 years ago most insurance companies wouldn't touch domestic houses in Dublin 1 but the general trend in inner city living has broken down their resistance. In the most recent open market property sale on North Great Georges Street, a house went for £250,000. "Obviously that sounds like a lot of money but when you consider that for that price you're getting a massive house of around 5,000 square feet, you can see how it could become very affordable for a group of like minded people.

BRIAN'S current bugbear is familiar to anyone who lives in any inner city anywhere parking. But he finds that a car is essential, especially in summer: "Living right in the centre of town can be a bit claustrophobic, and you just have to escape at weekends". Other than that, the positives far outweigh the negatives: the feeling of living right in the centre of a capital city is a major plus and there has to be that delicious feeling of having arrived there first, before the new wave of incentive driven inner city dwellers, arrived to buy up expensive shoebox apartments.

With more than 400 people now living on the street there is, the residents claim, a pleasant sense of community - with a nicely blurred division between the owner occupiers who live in Georgian splendour in their houses and the residents of the newer apartments. Lucky Duffys, the local sweetshop, is gossip central, the place where you can catch up on all the news and comings and goings and Nabil Saidi talks enthusiastically of meeting new neighbours at the local pub on Parnell Street.

"Taking one of these houses is a bit mad and eccentric," says Nabil, but it's a madness and eccentricity that managed to save an entire street - a street that forms part of the architectural backbone of the city - from certain destruction.