A little over 10 years ago, number 32 Villiers Road came up for sale in a sluggish market which at the time was showing little sign of recovery. Even given its location on the quiet Rathgar road, there wasn’t strong interest and the mid-terrace red-brick sold at auction for €450,000 on a guide price of €495,000.
Then it was in poor condition and subdivided into several flats, but – even allowing for all the work involved in bringing the Edwardian property back to a smart and comfortable single family home – its sale in 2018 for €1.43 million proved how canny that auction bidder had been.
The present owners, a young couple, walked into a turnkey, unpack your boxes and move in home – and that’s the same appealing proposition for buyers this time around, maybe even more so given the scarcity of builders. Back in 2018 the house had been staged for sale and they even bought some of the furniture, making their move seamless.
Inside, the 211sq m (2,271sq ft) of accommodation is spread over three floors and there are five bedrooms, with the largest located at the top of the house where it has an en suite shower room and a vast dressing area fitted with a wall of wardrobes. The four other bedrooms are below – two doubles and two singles, all low on storage – and a very large family bathroom as well as a separate shower room.
The major renovation included restoring the interconnecting reception rooms to add period fireplaces and new ceilings, and replacing the handsome box bay window to the front. There’s a glazed door in the rear reception room – used by the family as their dining room – that leads down some granite steps into a tiny internal courtyard area created when the extension was built across the rear. That extension made space for a larger family room, open-plan to the kitchen and a good-sized utility that opens into this courtyard.
The back garden is east facing, with a limestone patio directly outside the back door, an artificial lawn and an electric roller gate out to the vehicular lane that runs behind these houses. Several houses on the road have built garages or small studios at the end of their gardens, perhaps to facilitate working from home, although with five bedrooms in number 32 there’s plenty of options inside for that.
One measure of the quality of the 10-year old renovation is the Ber: of B2, a very good rating for an Edwardian-era property. The front garden was landscaped for low maintenance and, after more than a decade, still looks smart. Number 32 Villiers Road is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald asking €1,690,00.
