With a balcony you could fish from and canoes at the back door, Martha's Vineyard - the Dalkey home of film maker Jim Sheridan - is on the market at €8m. Property Editor Orna Mulcahyreports
Film maker and writer Jim Sheridan is selling Martha's Vineyard, the seaside home he built over the water in Dalkey, Co Dublin.
The house, which scooped an RIAI architectural award in 2006, is a slice of Malibu on the south Dublin coast - drop dead cool inside with its own cinema, a tidal swimming pool carved out of the rocks, and plenty of shelf space for Sheridan's numerous awards for films including Made in Americaand My Left Foot.
The asking price is €8 million, which doesn't represent a huge profit for the Dublin-born film maker and his wife Fran, who now divide their time between Ireland, the US and the French Riviera.
He bought the original Martha's Vineyard cottage in the late 1990s for around €1.3 million and spent an estimated €5 million knocking it down and rebuilding.
Selling agent Tom Day of Lisney is calling it "a once in a lifetime opportunity" and he has a point.
Very few contemporary houses have been built on the shore in the last 20 years, and this is certainly the most daring and beautiful.
The 360sq m (3,875sq ft) four-bedroom house took several years to complete. The original house was a Victorian cottage with an extension cantilevered over the sea but all that was demolished to make way for a granite and glass palace designed by De Blacam & Meagher to a dizzingly high spec.
Because of its very public location, directly on the road and close to the harbour, the brief was to design a house that would give very little away at street level, but be amazing inside.
In fact, the only way to see the full extent of the two-storey house is by sailing by in Dalkey Sound.
The limestone-clad entrance block has an adjoining gravelled garden with stainless steel railings allowing passers-by an uninterrupted view of the island.
Walk through the hardwood door and the view is mesmerising - the sea seems close enough to touch, though the floor-to-ceiling windows are in triple strength glass to withstand the weather which can be ferocious (a previous owner's grand piano was reportedly swept away in a storm).
A glass staircase leads to a lower level where the four bedrooms are linked directly to a continuous terrace overlooking the tidal swimming pool and the slipway down to the water where a couple of canoes are standing by.
The central section downstairs is a superb room with wall-to-wall windows and light spilling down the back wall from a glass brick walkway overhead. This is a party room that transforms to a cinema once a sweep of red velvet curtains glides across.
A wonderful sauna room has a magical view of the island, while the bathrooms are spare and elegant rather than opulent.
For those who love detail, there's a large plant room where the inner workings of the house are managed by a bank of electronics that is so complex Sheridan insisted on a row of On and Off switches to simplify matters.
