The privacy of a mews house built around 1981 in a Sandycove cul-de-sac was what appealed to Garratt Sullivan and his wife Sheila when they bought it in 2000. The detached house, accessed down a long driveway near the bottom of Arkendale Road, is quiet too, he says, even though its garden backs onto the Metals, the pedestrian footpath that runs beside the Dart line.
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An Grianan, 6A Arkendale Road, is a detached 177sq m (1,900sq ft) four-bedroom house, for sale for €1.275 million through Sherry FitzGerald.
Built by the late psychologist and journalist Patricia Redlich and the architect Brian Brennan, An Grianan's style is modern. A driveway beside one of the redbrick Victorian houses that line this side of Arkendale Road leads through a carport to the front of An Grianan, a brown brick house with only two small windows in its exterior north-facing wall.
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Full of light
Inside, however, the house is full of light, with floor-to-ceiling windows downstairs and Velux windows in bedrooms at the front of the house upstairs. It’s warm too: there are double-glazed Rationel windows throughout and underfloor heating upstairs and down beneath quarry-tiled floors. There are four heating zones upstairs, explains Sullivan, five downstairs, with controls concealed behind a panel in one of the bedrooms.
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The front hall is particularly bright, with a window from the top to the bottom of the house at the end overlooking the rear garden. A utility room and downstairs toilet open off it.
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The diningroom to the left has two floor-to-ceiling windows and a door out to the back garden.
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A wall of glass looks onto the back garden from the open-plan livingroom, which opens directly into the galley-style kitchen at the front of the house. Two doors at the side open into a rather old-fashioned sunroom at the side of the house.
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Outdoor room
The paved back garden is effectively an outdoor room, with a pretty water feature and fish pond and a raised bedding area filled with plants. There are plum, apple, pear and cherry trees here, and very mature trees in the private front garden.
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Of the four bedrooms upstairs, three are doubles; here also is a family bathroom. The main bedroom has an ensuite, a small dressing area and sliding glass doors onto an outside terrace. A bedroom at the front of the house – once a teenager’s room – also has a mezzanine accessed by a pull-down ladder.