Dublin 6: €5m A large redbrick facing onto a leafy park in D6 has grand Victorian details - but new owners will want to renovate, says Bernice Harrison
The houses facing onto Palmerston Park in Dublin 6 are, by any standards, fine period pieces in a great location.
The Palms at 20 Palmerston Park, a semi-detached 400sq m (4,300sq ft) two-storey over garden level redbrick built in the 1870s, is now on the market through Lisney, with an AMV of €5 million. It will be auctioned on October 11th.
The builder responsible for some of the other houses on this upmarket terrace kept this for himself and so added some extras such as the decorative mosaic tiles in the entrance hall and the Victorian conservatory to the side at hall level.
The current owners have lived here since the 1970s and when they moved in, the house was divided into three units.
They kept the garden level as a self-contained flat, living in the very spacious and grand upper levels. It appears to have been a relatively sympathetic divide although the stairs leading down to the basement are missing.
The front door is at the top of a flight of granite steps and at hall level there are two elegantly proportioned and very large reception rooms. The main one is to the front and it has two windows looking out on the park and a marble fireplace as well as good plasterwork.
The back diningroom has one of those lovely Victorian picture windows that overlooks the garden. It also has a marble fireplace.
There's a good-sized breakfast-room on this level. The conservatory to the side is now divided into a bathroom to the front and a kitchen to the back, an arrangement new owners will almost certainly change - hopefully to restore the conservatory back to its former glory. A spiral iron staircase leads down to the back garden from this level.
Upstairs off the roomy bright landing there are four fine double bedrooms as well as a small box room and a bathroom.
New owners will probably rethink upstairs, updating and maybe relocating the bathroom as well as installing en suites and maybe a dressingroom.
A legacy of its previous life as a subdivided house is that two of the bedrooms are knocked together so there is an archway between them, but this arrangement could be easily reversed.
Down at garden level, the self-contained flat has several rooms - but in this market, it's unlikely that prospective buyers will be too concerned with the details, as they will probably be eyeing this area with a view to re-incorporating it into the main house.
Part of the back garden has already been hived off for a mews which is not part of the sale but it is still long and, thanks to the dimensions of the house, wide. The front garden features several palm trees - giving the house its name, "The Palms". Number 20 is in the section of the road that doesn't get much passing traffic.
