St Helen's Road is a U-shaped residential road of Crampton-built semis situated just off the Rock Road, a coast road so busy it is best known for its near permanent place in rush-hour traffic bulletins.
Built in the 1930s, the houses tend to come to the market either as complete doer-uppers, typically executor’s sales, or as recently extended and renovated ready-to-walk into family homes.
Number 40, the latest house on the popular road to come on the market is in the latter category. For sale through Beirne & Wise for €1.15 million, the property has been lived in by its current owners for about 10 years.
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In that time they renovated and extended so that the four-bed semi now has 196sq m (2,110sq ft) of floor space, including the garage.
Potential
There is still potential for new owners to extend further – by converting the garage and then building over it – and indeed that’s what many of the newer owners on the road have done. In the meantime, there is plenty of space in this well-laid out family home.
The extension, which runs across the rear, is an appealing selling point. The large, bright room – the rear wall is entirely glazed – has a good-sized seating area, a dining area and a well laid out fitted kitchen.
Off this to the side, and behind the garage, is a large utility room and a shower room. There is also the original interconnecting reception rooms which happily still have their 1930s tile fireplaces – often ripped out and replaced with something far blander.
Another appealing – and practical – original feature is the deep porch with its terrazzo floor.
Rear extension
Upstairs, there are three double bedrooms, a small single, and the family bathroom which is dated and will probably need updating.
Outside the rear extension is a sandstone patio raised about a metre from the small grassy part of the garden. A family with small children would put a railing or fence around the patio before they do much else because it’s quite a drop.
St Helen’s Road is popular with families trading up from smaller three-bed semis in the surrounding suburbs and prices tend to be about the €800,000 mark for houses in need of work and more than €1 million for extended turn-key ones. The most recent sale on the register was number 25 which sold just shy of its asking price of €1.1 million.
