Blessed with love, a period home for family
IF we’d have had a spare €20,000 at the time, we would probably have the red cobble-lock at the front.” The current owners of 60 Leinster Road are reminiscing about the 30 years that they have spent in their lovely home, including the time when red cobble-lock was all the rage and they had a visit from a man with a van soon after they got planning permission for off-street parking. With hindsight, they are glad that there was no spare €20,000 knocking around – the gravel to the front of the house was cheaper and more elegant.
No 60 is a lesson in how to live well in a period house, to respect the fabric of the house and not be swayed by passing trends, without turning it into a museum. Wider than many of its neighbours, at the upper end of Leinster Road, the proportions of the house are more than generous.
The couple bought No 60 in 1987 from an elderly woman who had lived there for 50 years. They think that it has probably only changed hands a few times since it was built.
“She had been widowed young, and operated the house as some class of a nursing home. There were Yale locks on all the doors and a kitchen in every press, but it hadn’t been vandalised, and all the original period features were intact. The story is that when she was leaving she had a great party to which she invited the whole of Leinster Road, with a butler manning a full bar in the entrance hall and someone playing a grand piano in the living room!”
That hallway is very grand indeed, with its original wooden floor, ornate cornicing and archway. There’s a second archway with a beautiful stained-glass window on the return leading to the first floor. The living room to the front and dining room to the rear mirror one another, and the original dividing doors are still in situ. Both rooms have original black marble fireplaces, cornicing and sash windows.
Upstairs, there is a double bedroom with a compact en-suite shower room on the return, and on the first floor two further bedrooms and the family bathroom, which has a double walk-in shower. Painted in Farrow & Ball’s moodily gothic shade of ‘Railings’, the master bedroom – which had been divided into three rooms at some stage – is both magnificent and enormous, spanning the width of the house and with views of the Dublin mountains from its two sash windows.
“We moved in when our children were very small,” say the current owners, “and we took our time refurbishing the house and getting it right, principally because we were constrained by lack of funds. We sanded the floors and stripped all the doors ourselves – we were quite mad.”
Over the years No 60 has been well-maintained, and the decor is both stylish and timeless. The owners installed a new boiler, heating and hot water system in 2015; the system is zoned and can be controlled remotely, as can the monitored alarm system.
The owners, who are downsizing, say that No 60 has been a ‘brilliant family house’, and that they consider themselves very lucky to have lived here.
They have made the most of its flexibility, and for a time when their children were in their teens and twenties, generously moved down to the garden level – which is configured as an independent two-bedroom apartment with its own entrance and a large kitchen/living room complete with wood-burning stove. They gave their offspring (‘and many of their friends’) the run of the two upper floors. They installed a free-standing IKEA kitchen on the ground floor return to facilitate this, but this room could easily revert to use as a study or sixth bedroom. The garden level space offers the possibility of rental income for new owners who don’t need all of the 279sqm of living space that the house offers.
Outside, the back garden is generous and rather charming, with plenty of room for swings and slides and vegetable growing and eating outside. There is a lapsed permission for a substantial mews house at the end, with access on to Grosvenor Lane. There is precedent for this next door, and new owners will undoubtedly wish to explore the possibility of re-applying for planning.
Leinster Road bridges the gap between two city villages – Rathmines, at one end, is newly bustling these days. Soon to be unveiled are a new art house cinema and Fallon & Byrne Food Hall, while Harold’s Cross is seeing some smart new eating spots pop up – among them the brandnew Five Points cafe, as well as Craft, an elegant restaurant for more leisurely outings. There are also schools aplenty including St Mary’s, St Louis’ and Kildare Place schools.