Architects' three-bedroom house on Emor Street in Portobello has a €720,000 guide. Emma Cullinan reports

People were amazed when a fairly modest house in Portobello, Dublin 8, sold for €850,00 recently. Perhaps it's purely coincidence, but since then a good few properties have come onto the market in the gridded enclave of streets that sits between the South Circular Road, Heytesbury Street and Clanbrassil Street.

With these main arteries skirting its edges, there's little through traffic in this neighbourhood.

While estate agents are saying that they can't use the €850,000 house as a guide for everything else - they still think it could be something of a one-off - they are keeping an open mind as prices here just keep rising.

Number 4 Emor Street, a three-bedroom house, is one of two coming to the market this week through Sherry FitzGerald. Beautifully revamped pretty much from scratch, it has a guide of €720,000 prior to auction on May 26th.

The terraced house was bought almost on impulse - in 1997 by architects Nicki Cloonan and Brian O'Donnell. Brian often visited homes for sale for work reasons and when he saw this two-storey house, he was taken by its orientation.

The stairs run across the house, rather than up and away from the front door, a peculiarity of certain house designs in this area. This means that the main livingroom runs uninterrupted across the back of the house, allowing an all important close link with the garden, and lots of natural light. When they bought the house, this room incorporated two bedsits, with another bedsit by the front door and yet another where the kitchen is now jutting out into the garden.

The house had no period features which made it easy to strip everything out. There were none of those decisions we've all made where you may keep bathroom tiling for the time being, even if you don't really like it, as it's just about liveable with.

Along with stripping out all of the "decoration" a lot of the walls came down as well. "The divisions upstairs made no sense at all," says Brian, "so we just worked out how to maximise the layout." This has resulted in two bedrooms to the front, a main, en suite bedroom facing the garden to the rear, and an internal bathroom made bright through the addition of a Velux light.

The spaces downstairs were designed to make the house flexible, with the main dining and living area offering a place to sit by the fire and read books and talk, while the front room takes the overflow of either children playing or TV watchers. The way that the garden relates to the house was very important to Nickie and Brian, who did all the planting, wall building, bed raising and deck laying. This is the same decking that Brian worked with on a conservation project at Trim Castle. To the rear is a former garage which has been overhauled up to living/office standards.