In the 1930s when sites in Dublin 6 were clearly more plentiful the builder who took on a piece of land on Richmond Avenue South built just two detached houses on the substantial corner site. Named Glenart and Nutgrove, and positioned directly across from the Luas Milltown stop, these houses rarely come on the market.
Nutgrove was sold by its downsizing owners in 2015 for €3.125 million after they had lived there since the early 1980s. Now Glenart is on the market – in an executor’s sale – for the first time in 50 years. Sherry FitzGerald is the agent seeking €2.75 million, with potential buyers most likely to be young families trading up.
The 305sq m (3,283sq ft) pebble dash and redbrick house sits on a 0.3 acre mature site, setting it well back from the road and with a substantial back garden giving it a great sense of privacy.
The hall door is to the side, opening into a porch and then into the inner hall with its anaglypta paper and dado rail giving viewers their first sense of the house’s distinctive interior style.
It has five bedrooms, three receptions and as both the hall and landing are of generous proportions and the ceilings throughout are high, the two-storey property feels spacious.
The ground floor has a simple layout of four main rooms, with the formal livingroom to the rear opening out to the garden. Upstairs is more rambling with the bedrooms – all doubles – on two levels, most with dual aspect, and with a room in the eaves for storage.
Glenart has been lived in as a comfortable family home, significantly updated in the owners’ early years there with a new kitchen and bathrooms and a reworking of the bedrooms which saw a large master bedroom en suite created out of two smaller bedrooms, and in much later years when one of the downstairs reception rooms – the diningroom to the front – was converted to a bedroom with a modern en suite.
Buyers now will embark on an extensive renovation programme – probably reorganising the layout of the ground floor, extending at the back to move the eat-in kitchen from the side to the rear and provide greater access to the garden. The BER is a chilly G – a further indication of the improvements that will need to be made. There’s plenty of scope to extend – not just to the rear but also to the side where there is a garage.
Glenart’s neighbour on the other side, Hatherton – a very different, much older and grander house – sold in 2017 for €4.8 million.
