Dodder Ground, a substantial home on Clonskeagh’s Milltown Bridge Road has appeared on the property price register having sold for €4 million.
Not only does the sale price represent the highest price achieved for a home in Dublin 14 since the introduction of the register, but the Block has also learned that the deal was not brokered by one of the larger agencies usually responsible for off-market transactions of this magnitude. Instead the Crampton-built house on an acre of lawns was sold by an independent estate agent for its downsizing owners to a young family.
Dodder Ground is located in a residential enclave, bounded by Maple, Laburnum, Whitebeam and Milltown Bridge Roads, that remains one of South Dublin's most desirable suburban developments. When it was completed in 1939, builder Hugh Crampton took the home for himself.
From 1950, it was rented to the Argentine embassy for 45 years. The current owners purchased it in 1995, when it was offered for sale with a guide price of IR£900,000. This was considered too high for individuals to retain the house and lands as a single private residence and when the house sold in June of that year for 50 per cent over the guide price – IR£1,350,000 – a planning application was lodged within months for the construction of more than 20 apartments on the site.
The development, Woodhaven, occupies the majority of the original site, with the house now sitting on less than an acre of land, yet it is still likely to be the largest single-home site in the neighbourhood.
Surprisingly, the home’s exterior has changed very little, if at all, since it was purchased almost two decades ago. It still features the same distinctive green copper awnings and ridge caps. Extending to approximately 4,000sq ft, it is a large home, however it is not unthinkable that the new owners might extend, as the appetite for increasingly large homes in Dublin grows.
Across the street, the owners of 1 Maple Road, which sold in late-2011, have secured permission in recent months to extend the house from 3,100sq ft to almost 5,000sq ft – following in the footsteps of 7 and 11 Maple Road, both of which surpassed the 5,000sq ft mark more than a decade ago.
