Private sale at Pavilion Gate
1 PAVILION GATE Foxrock, Dublin 18 €1.295m
‘THERE’S not a whole lot of mystery to selling a house,” says Aine McMahon, “so long as you have a good solicitor by your side.”
Aine spent many years living in New York and worked in real estate in Manhattan, so she knows what she’s talking about. She’s also successfully sold a house privately in Dublin before. That other property was in Carysfort Downs in Blackrock, just a couple of miles down the road from No 1 Pavilion Gate in Foxrock, which she is now selling because it’s time to down-size from a large family home.
Aine originally brought No 1 to the market in the fourth quarter of last year, priced at €1.4m. The five-bedroom family home has just come back to the market with a price drop of over €100,000.
“I noticed that similar properties in the area were taking their time to shift,” says Aine, “and I am ready to sell now, because I like to travel and have no need for such a big house, so it made sense to drop the price.”
Estate agents who despair of vendors with unrealistic expectations would be falling over themselves for a pragmatic client such as Aine, but for the time being she’s decided to go it alone.
“The only real inconvenience of not having an estate agent,” she maintains, “is that we can only list the property on daft.ie, and not myhome.ie, as the latter will only take listings from estate agents.”
The gently curved Pavilion Gate development, which overlooks Carrickmines Tennis Club, was built by Mark McInerney in the early 2000s. There are just 10 red-brick ‘executive’ houses, all of them similar in style, on one side of the road, with the two homes at either end slightly larger than those which they bookend. No 1 — one of the two larger houses — is the first house after the entrance, and sits behind electric gates with off-street parking for up to three cars to the front.
It is a substantial family home, with five bedrooms and enough reception rooms to permit everyone in the house to have their own relaxation space. In fact, the configuration of the house would lend itself, subject to planning permission, to conversion into two separate units, with a compact granny flat to the side.
To the left of the entrance hall is a drawing room with interconnecting double doors to the dining room. Both rooms have Portuguese limestone fireplaces. The dining room opens on to a Poggenpohl kitchen fitted with a range of integrated appliances and a double-glazed Hampton conservatory. There are also a breakfast room and a large utility room adjacent to the kitchen, as well as a family television room, while to the right of the entrance hall is a study.
Upstairs there are five bedrooms, two of which are en suite, plus the family bathroom. The main bedroom has a roomy walk-in dressing room, and the other bedrooms all have fitted wardrobes.
The attic, currently accessible via a folding staircase, is already floored, walled and plumbed, and nicely bright thanks to Velux windows in the roof. Aine says that some of the neighbouring houses have installed a fixed staircase and created additional bedrooms at this level, something that will be an option open to new owners. The attic could also make a fine home office.
The house is in immaculate condition and ready for new owners to move into straight away.
Outside, there is a private walled garden with a patio and raised flower beds.
In terms of convenience, this is a great location with the Carrickmines Luas stop just across the road, the 63 bus stop adjacent and access to the M50 a few hundred metres away.
Dunnes’ flagship store at Cornelscourt is the nearest supermarket, and Foxrock village has shops and restaurants, including local favourite, Bistro One.
Words by Katy McGuinness