City townhouse with one-bed income earner

Dublin 8: €1.4m A two-storey over basement house on 25 Longwood Avenue off the South Circular Road in Dublin 8 is for auction…

Dublin 8: €1.4mA two-storey over basement house on 25 Longwood Avenue off the South Circular Road in Dublin 8 is for auction on February 7th through Felicity Fox with an AMV of €1.4 million.

It's an unusual and very contemporary conversion - a sympathetic design that won an award for its architects, the Dublin-based Boyd Cody.

The owners, who moved in during 2000, kept and updated the rental apartment in the basement and live in the rest of the two-storey, two-bedroom house.

It's immediately clear that the work involved taking the house back to the bare brick and rethinking how best to use the space.

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The hall was made narrower to give extra space to the living areas, and the staircase was replaced with a new iroko one - there is Iroko flooring throughout the house. What were once two reception rooms is now one large one - with the living area at one end and the kitchen at the other.

Its discrete design acknowledges that it is part of the house's only living space so painted timber kitchen cupboards were built-in along one wall - both above an below counter level - and the timber island unit, with its cover for the sink, looks like a piece of furniture.

Concealed behind a door is a small, shelved utility room plumbed for a washing machine.

A feature of this room is the large, glazed sliding door which opens on to the raised terrace - the room is very bright, gaining light at both ends.

Other designer touches include smartly designed bookshelves built-in to the wall, concealed strip lighting in the ceiling and a simple, raised fireplace.

Upstairs there are two double bedrooms, each with roomy built-in, or walk-in wardrobes, as well as a family bathroom.

A one-bedroom, self-contained apartment is in the basement and, while the house comes with planning permission to reincorporate it back into the house, new owners might appreciate the income that such a well fitted-out apartment in this location would earn.

This is an end-of-terrace house and there's car-parking at the end of the back garden, accessed by a sliding electric gate. There's also a front garden.

Bernice Harrison

Bernice Harrison

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist and cohost of In the News podcast