Number 43 Morehampton Road is a three-storey townhouse with stories to tell about visiting guests – if only its walls could talk. Set 24m back from the busy thoroughfare, it last came to market in 1992, when the asking price was £90,000, or about €115,000.
It was purchased in 1932 by Blanaid Salkeld, who is best known as being a poet, actor and publisher, as well as being a member of Cumann na mBan, and she regularly hosted salons at the property. Visitors included Maud Gonne and Ernie O’Malley.
Her son was the artist Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, whose murals still adorn the walls of Davy Byrne’s pub, off Grafton Street in Dublin. His own coterie of like-minded comrades included Brian O’Nolan/Myles na gCopaleen, who modelled the character Cashel in At Swim-Two-Birds on the artist.
Whether it’s coming back for a feed after closing time, as may have been the practice in Behan’s day, to picking up some sourdough at the farmers’ market in Herbert Park or catching the Aircoach to fly off somewhere exotic, the property is extremely well located but in need of some modernisation.
It was in the dining room, the front room at hall level, where na gCopaleen would verbally joust with Brendan Behan and where Cecil’s daughter Beatrice first met Brendan, who would become her husband. Cecil had met him in the pub and brought him back to the house.
The relatively modestly sized room has a Kilkenny marble fireplace; to its rear is the good-sized kitchen. This opens out to a southwest-facing garden, which, while it’s 20m long, narrows from 4.2m to 2.1m in width. Out here, in a shed, Cecil and his mother set up the Gayfield Press.
Vehicular access to the rear of the garden is via a lane that runs along the side of the Hampton Hotel. This is a sizeable communal space that the terrace of dormer townhouses all share.
While new owners could extend the kitchen, another option is to open it through to the dining room at the front, which would give all the elements required for a more contemporary combined kitchen, living room and dining room without further building costs. There’s already a shower room at this level.
On the first floor the formal living room to the front, where perhaps many of these luminaries talked, has been divided into two bedrooms. The main bedroom is to the rear.
On the second floor there are three rooms, two to the front and a kitchen to the rear, which was once Cecil’s studio. There is also a tiny shower room, but it would make more sense to turn one room into a bathroom and have two bedrooms at this level.
The BER-exempt property, which extends to 153sq m (1,647sq ft), is asking €1.1 million through agents Eoin O’Neill Property Advisors.
