Foxrock €5.75m:A handsome Victorian house has been reinvented as a high spec family home. Eoin Lyonsreports.

A LARGE detached house on an acre of gardens on Foxrock's Torquay Road has an AMV of €5.75 million prior to auction by Sherry FitzGerald on March 5th.

Built in 1860, the house has changed hands only three times since. It's not hard to understand why. The handsome 376sq m (4,045sq ft) five-bedroom house has just the right amount of space without being rambling and sits on almost an acre of gardens.

The owners have turned it into a high spec home that is all about modern comfort.

Set back from the road at the end of a crunchy pebble driveway, the exterior of Glenarm has the best elements of Victorian villa-style architecture: a gabled façade, balanced proportions, large bay windows and a pretty entrance porch.

From this porch, one enters into a wide hall. In the distance are double doors to the kitchen at the back of the house.

The current owners, a couple with young children, have added lots of subtle architectural details such as panelling the walls of the entrance hall to mid-height.

Everything from new doors to wide fireplaces look authentic and nothing jars the eye. What potential purchasers will get is a perfect shell to create a family home.

To the right is a library with bookcases covering two walls. These have an old-fashioned rail and ladder to reach the higher shelves. This room could also be used as a formal diningroom.

On the other side of the hall are two interconnecting rooms - one is a drawingroom, the other a smaller music room.

What's striking about these three rooms is their brightness - multiple windows help.

There is a guest toilet and cloakroom lined with floor-to-ceiling storage cupboards on either side of the passage to the kitchen. There is seemingly endless storage in this house: one entire side of the kitchen (quite a long stretch) also has painted storage cupboards.

The kitchen is made up of three areas that run into one another and create a very comfortable family space. There's the kitchen proper in the centre, with painted units and a range cooker set into an alcove.

This divides it from the conservatory. The conservatory, built by Hampton Conservatories, opens to a patio area. On the other side is a sitting area with sofas and a fireplace. Off this is a utility room.

Windows run along the back of the house; the current owners have left them uncurtained, as the rear of the house is not overlooked.

From the family sitting area a glazed corridor leads to a home office. Doors from this corridor open to the back garden on one side and a courtyard on the other. Gates open from the courtyard to the driveway at the front of the house.

The other side of the courtyard has a garage currently fitted out as a home gym which could easily be converted to guest accommodation or a flat for a live-in nanny.

The first floor return opens onto a room-sized lobby off which there are two children's bedrooms, separated by a shared shower room.

On the first floor proper there is a guest bedroom with an en suite and a walk-in wardrobe. The large main bedroom also faces the front of the house and also has an en suite - when double doors are open, there is a view of a modern freestanding bath from the bedroom.

The bathroom has double sinks sitting on white marble tops, tiles that mimic wallpaper and a large shower unit. The space is well thought out with a New England-ish look. In the converted attic space is a very large children's bedroom with four rooflights and under-eaves storage.

The current owners say that what first attracted them to the house was the size of the back garden and the accompanying birdsong from tall trees that line the boundary.

To better enjoy the garden they have built a timber pavilion, another of the small details that mark this property out as very special.