A five-bedroom house on Highfield Road, Rathgar, is set to make over £700,000 at a Hamilton Osborne King auction on November 24th.
The terraced redbrick house, number 54, is located at the Rathgar end of this long residential road which links Rathmines with Rathgar. It is part of an Edwardian terrace and has some of the grander features of that period, including 12 ft ceiling height in the reception rooms, fine marble fireplaces and tall, narrow windows.
It also has an intriguing feature in the garden - an air raid shelter built during the second World War that looks for all the world like a giant concrete beehive. The front garden has been gravelled over to provide off-street parking and it is dominated by a stately yew. Double doors open into a porch leading to the front door. Inside, the house is in good order having been renovated by the current owners over the past 12 years.
When they bought the house it was divided into two flats but none of the original features had been lost so restoring it as a family home was easier than expected. Aside from general renovation, they also added a teak conservatory and installed a new kitchen. True to type, the house has two interconnecting reception rooms, the front-facing drawing-room being the grander of the two with its white marble chimney-piece and wide bay window with stained-glass insets.
High folding doors separate it from the rear reception room and this, in turn, opens into the conservatory. More of a sunroom than a conservatory, it is a long narrow room with a Junckers floor. It is used as a dining-room and has both a door and a serving hatch leading into the kitchen. The kitchen has been totally remodelled with a specially designed fitted kitchen in solid wood with a ceramic tile worktop. Most of the appliances are to be included in the sale. The floor has been covered in quarry tiles and a cast-iron solid fuel boiler completes the country look.
Upstairs are four double bedrooms and one small single. All except one have working fireplaces. The main bedroom is the most impressive with its angular bay window and decorative marble fireplace. As the house is now home to a growing family, the bedrooms are likely to be the first rooms to be redecorated by the new owners.
There are family bathrooms on the first and second returns. The back garden is almost 90 ft long and has access to a pedestrian lane at the back of the houses. Clearly well tended, it is full of flowering shrubs, fruit trees and assorted flowering plants.
