A house with dignity and a comfortable style, number 41 Cowper Road is also a house that has been well lived in. The vendor bought in 1986 and in the more than 30 years since has made it a welcoming family home.
Long years before that, when Henry Coghlan finishing building in 1891, one Peter Nugent and family moved in. Families since have enjoyed both the house, in which the original, sumptuous layout is much unchanged, and the 115ft-long south-facing rear garden with its lawn, patio and exotically sheltering line of high cypress trees.
Number 41’s location also has more than a little of the sumptuous about it. On a 0.4-acre site on a road filled with greenery of all kinds, it has venerable cherry trees in the front garden, is a mere 100 yards from the Luas and is opposite the architecturally interesting Mageough Home around which Cowper Road, Temple Gardens and Temple Villas were all originally developed.
Double fronted, wider than its neighbours and with a large garage prime for development, the house itself has a floor area of 380sq m (4,088sq ft) with five bedrooms (four en-suite), a notable entrance hallway, four reception rooms and an open kitchen/breakfast room. Agent Sherry FitzGerald is asking €4.9 million.
The vendor, who carried out modernising work in 2001 but “did not change much in the house over the years” says that the cherry trees “used to come out in May. Now they bloom in March, a whole two months earlier”.
These are currently a thing of beauty. An open-plan kitchen/breakfast area was added in 2001 at the same time as the original eight bedrooms were reduced to five with four en-suites.
Ochre-coloured walls
Picture and dado rails, cornicing, floor tiles and planks, the fascinating brass, Egyptian-style knocker and fittings on the front door, knobs on original internal doors, windows and much more are all original and intact.
The entrance hallway is a well from which the house springs with the stairs, as it climbs past ochre-coloured walls and dado rails, made interesting by decoratively curled spindles.
The front-facing drawing room has a period-style cast iron fireplace, ceiling height of some 11.5ft and a wide bay window. Deep red walls and a box bay window give a formality to the dining room that is relieved by the small and perfectly equipped bar just off it.
A ground-floor living room has polished wood flooring, a bay window over the rear garden and a hatch leading to the kitchen.
The kitchen itself has a pitched pine ceiling, maple fittings and a great curve of window overlooking the rear garden. The bedrooms begin on the first of two returns. The main bedroom, with wonderful views of the bell tower in the Mageough Home opposite, is on the first floor. It has an en-suite with bidet, bath and separate bath as well as a dressing room.
