HOW does Dublin 4 – Ireland’s most expensive address – compare to the word’s priciest locations? During the height of the boom, developer Seán Dunne paid €58 million for Walford – a detached house on the exclusive, leafy Dublin 4 boulevard, Shrewsbury Road - the highest price ever paid for a house in Ireland.
But prices have dropped considerably since the onset of the financial crisis. Today, there is just one house officially for sale on Shrewsbury Road.
Thorndene, a modern house built in the Victorian style, and owned by entrepreneur and star of RTÉ's Dragons' Den, Niall O'Farrell, is for sale through Colliers with an asking price of €14 million but they are "open to offers".
The seven-bedroom “bespoke luxury residence”, designed by the late architect Sam Stephenson, has a 50ft swimming pool, steam room, shower room, gym, cinema, bar and wine cellar.
The house has 863sq m (9,300sq ft) of living space which works out at a whopping €16,222 per sq m. An astonishing sum – but way outside the big league.
In fact, the Ballsbridge enclave costs less than one-fifth the price of the world’s most expensive real estate, which is to be found in Avenue Princesse Grace in the sunny Mediterranean tax-haven of Monaco.
There, a square metre of living space costs about £77,000 (€90,000) – almost as much a family home in Leitrim.
The avenue is much favoured by Russian oligarchs and oil-rich Arab sheikhs.
In the latest list of the world’s most expensive streets, Chemin de Saint-Hospice in Cap Ferrat – close to Nice on the French Riviera – captures the second spot pushing New York’s Fifth Avenue and London’s Kensington Palace Gardens into third and fourth places.
The list features all the traditional haunts of the international moneyed set but the arrival of nouveau-riche Moscow (number nine) and Sydney (number 10) suggests that changes are afoot in the distribution of global wealth.
World's dearest streets
Residential prices in sterling per sq m
1 Avenue Princesse Grace, Monaco: £77,000
2 Chemin de Saint-Hospice, Cap Ferrat, France: £64,000
3 Fifth Avenue, New York: £46,000
4 Kensington Palace Gardens, London: £42,000
5 Avenue Montaigne, Paris: £35,000
6 Via Suvretta, St Moritz, Switzerland: £29,000
7 Via Romazzino, Porto Cervo, Sardinia: £27,000
8 Severn Road, The Peak, Hong Kong: £26,000
9 Ostozhenka Street, Moscow: £23,000
10 Wolseley Road, Sydney: £18,000
.Source: Wealth Bulletin
