When it comes to the sale of prime residential property, €11.7 million may still count as a significant sum, but as July gives way to August it’s just enough to give 73 Ailesbury Road the runner-up spot for the prices achieved in the Dublin market in 2022. Having comfortably led the charge up to now, the 1920s Ballsbridge mansion has been left trailing in the wake of the recent off-market sale, for more than €12 million, of St Kilda, on Sandycove Avenue East, in south Dublin.
Situated within a short stroll of Sandycove beach, the Forty Foot bathing spot and the landmark Martello-tower premises of the James Joyce Centre, the extended villa-style property had been home for many years to the late Peter Cosgrave, his wife, Oonagh, and their family. Cosgrave, who died in 2019, was one of Ireland’s leading property developers and founder, with two of his brothers, Joe and Mick, of the Cosgrave Property Group. At the turn of the 20th century, long before the arrival of the Cosgrave family, St Kilda served as the family home of Francis Falkner, a grocer with shops on Grafton Street in Dublin and in London.
The Irish Times understands that Oonagh Cosgrave engaged Inhous to find a buyer for St Kilda. With offices in London and in Dublin, the agency specialises in the sale and sourcing of properties for high-net-worth and ultra-high net-worth individuals across the globe. Before handling St Kilda, the agency’s Dublin private-clients division had brokered the €8.22 million off-market sale in June 2021 of Glenheather on Avoca Avenue in Blackrock. Inhous declined to comment on its involvement or otherwise in the sale of St Kilda when contacted by The Irish Times.
The Residential Property Price Register shows that two other homes in Sandycove also changed hands for multimillion-euro sums recently. In May, 9 Sandycove Point was sold for €5,191,950 while White Sails, on Marine Parade, secured €5 million.
Farther south along the coast, Dunmara, the lavish coastal home on Strand Road in Killiney that the celebrity lawyer Gerald Kean once shared with his former wife, Clodagh Hopkins, was sold earlier this year for €4.15 million. Having placed the five-bedroom castellated mansion on the market in 2016, Hopkins finally secured its sale through the Lansdowne Partnership agency on January 28th, according to the Property Price Register.
Elsewhere in the capital, other high-end homes sold so far this year include Hatherton in Dartry which sold recently for €6.45 million, and 1 Raglan Road and 17 Raglan Road, in Ballsbridge, which sold for €4 million and €5.5 million in May and June respectively.
The ever-popular southside suburb of Foxrock has seen several recent sales for about €4 million each. Turnberry, the one-time Kerrymount Avenue home of the property developer Paddy Shovlin, changed hands quietly in May for €4 million, according to the property-price register, or about €900,000 more than it achieved when it last sold, on June 26th, 2019, while Cooldrinagh, the former Dublin residence of the late property developer John Flynn and the childhood home of Samuel Beckett, was sold recently for €3.8 million.
