THE long-running saga over St Helen's House and gardens, overlooking the Stillorgan dual carriageway in Co Dublin has finally ended with a decision to convert it into a 150-bedroom hotel. The Georgian mansion has been bought for close to £2 million by Cosgrave Brothers, which will begin work shortly on restoring and extending it at a further cost of £12 million.

The new owners are to open negotiations with a number of Irish and international hotel chains interested in operating a four or five-star hotel. Work on the new hotel is expected to be completed within 12 months. The receptions and dining areas will be located in the restored house and the bedrooms will be developed in a new four-storey extension for which planning permission has already been granted. The entire hotel will have a floor area of 100,000 square feet including an underground car-park to accommodate 170 cars.

The Cosgrave brothers, Peter, Joe and Michael, who are regarded as market leaders in the Dublin house-building industry, also plan to restore the 4.5-acre gardens, which are located in a woodland setting.

St Helen's has been owned for the past eight years by Berland, which recently sold an adjoining site for apartments following the resolution of a dispute in the firm.

Berland originally secured planning permission for a 101-bedroom hotel in 1990 but the project did not go ahead because of the depressed state of the hotel industry. The company later failed to get planning permission to build a three-storey block on each side of the house for 95,000 square feet of offices.

Five years ago, Dun Laoghaire Corporation described St Helen's as "perhaps the finest house in the borough". It has since lost some of its gloss but Cosgrave Brothers says that when it is restored, it will once again be one of Dublin's great Georgian houses.

The property was sold by tender through Gunne, which was joint agent with Jones Lang Wootton.