Since moving into Pine Lodge, in Greystones, in 2017, the Golden Globe-winning actor Saoirse Ronan has spent a small fortune transforming her €1.4 million Edwardian-style house into the kind of home befitting a Hollywood star.
The only problem is that the demands of her career mean she hasn't had time to enjoy it. Apart from one or two sightings in the Co Wicklow seaside town itself, and at the nearby Firehouse Bakery, in Delgany village, Ronan seems barely to have spent a wet weekend there.
And so, although it should hardly come as a surprise, it will come as something of a disappointment to locals to learn that the celebrated actor has put her home on the market.
Ronan only bought the property from its previous owner, Alan Gray, the economist who was the crisis-era confidant of the former taoiseach Brian Cowen, for €1.4 million on September 29th, 2017.
Just under two years later, Galvin Property is guiding a price of €1.5 million for the five-bedroom, five-bathroom detached house, which was built in the 1970s. Viewings, strictly by appointment, are expected to get under way this week.
Located at the end of a sweeping tree-lined avenue, behind wrought-iron electronically controlled gates, the 450sq m (4,840sq ft) house has, according to the agent’s website, been redesigned and modernised by Ronan, whom it refers to only as the “current owner”.
The listing says: "The layout and finish will impress even the most particular and comes to the market ready for the new owners to move in, and invite their family and friends to 'ooh and aah'."
It adds, about the kitchen: “The current owner has painstakingly designed and decorated this open plan room so to be practical, comfortable and aesthetically impressive all in equal measures.”
A bedroom close to the master bedroom has been turned into a large walk-in wardrobe, with a “luxurious en suite bathroom with separate shower comparable to a hotel suite in uptown New York”.
The Carlow-born actor’s move to sell Pine Lodge comes just 11 months after her acquisition, for €1.5 million, of a new, and far more modest, three-bedroom terraced house off Chepstow Road in London’s fashionable Notting Hill district.
Having received her first Oscar nomination at the age of 14, for her role in the film of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, Ronan secured the Golden Globe for best actress in 2018, for her title role in Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig.
She was nominated for an Oscar for the same role but lost out to Frances McDormand, who clinched it for the Martin McDonagh film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
