It’s taken nearly a decade to renovate this house on Montpelier Parade in Monkstown, that comes with a long garden and space for a mews. Now the owner is selling up

MONTPELIER Parade is distinctive, a landmark terrace in Monkstown, Co Dublin, where building first began in 1798. Tall and narrow, the houses have all the height and grace of homes built to overlook the sea. Later, the Victorians added more villas on the lower ground running down to the railway, and so Montpelier is more about distant views.

Number 49 is one of the most distinctive of its row, with its severe grey front in which the windows seem to glint more than those of its ice-cream coloured neighbours.

After a careful restoration lasting years, it has a fine sense of what the original must have been like. It’s now for sale through Savills at €1.3m.

The three-storey over garden level home has 222sq m (2,400sq ft), with three bedrooms, four reception rooms and a large kitchen/breakfastroom. The southwest facing back garden is 120ft (37sq m) long with planning permission, granted three years ago, to build a mews. The seller, much taken by “its elegant proportions”, bought the house for €690,000 in late 2002. “It was in a severely dilapidated state, uninhabitable really,” he says, “but I wanted to turn it into a contemporary home using the original proportions.” He spent more than half the purchase price refurbishing, including a new roof. Montpelier Parade is preservation listed so the work done had to comply with a stringent “Restoration of Character” order. “Everything is precisely as it should be,” the vendor assures.

“A majority of windows have the old, mottled glass and a few modern ones have been replaced with the sash kind. The fireplaces are probably late 19th century, any floorboards that were usable were salvaged. Room to room and floor to floor it’s exactly the elegant home of gracious proportions I’d hoped to achieve.”

The house’s first owner was Montgomery Greene. His address, in New South Wales, Australia, gives the house the allure of a background story – New South Wales as a state was only 20 years old at the time.

Fidelity to the house’s origins meant reinstating the front-facing, first-floor room as a drawing room. Given lots of light by a trio of sash windows, it has a white marble fireplace, and a polished timber floor and picture rail. An ensuite bedroom on this floor has a window over the garden.

The best views are from the window of a top floor bathroom with sunken bath, which looks clear across rooftops to the Dublin mountains. Two arched windows on the turn of the stairs give similar Three Rock Mountain views as well as a great deal of light.

The colours throughout are rich, though muted, pastels. These are particularly suited to the traditional sitting and diningrooms at hall-floor level, which have wide-plank polished timber floors, original double doors, shuttered windows and a black marble fireplace in the sittingroom.

The kitchen/breakfastroom runs from the front to the rear of the house at garden level. A French window opens from the breakfast/family area to a small patio and long grassy garden, with its fruit trees and granite walls. The kitchen fittings include a centre aisle with polished granite top, a Lacanche range and cream painted units. A comprehensive utility room at this level opens directly to the garden.

The main, second-floor bedroom is front facing with three half-sized windows and a cast-iron fireplace. The third bedroom is to the rear and also has a cast-iron fireplace.