A three-bedroom property in Dublin’s embassy belt looks from the outside like a period house – but is one of four built in the early 1990s by businessman Harry Crosbie on the site of Correen, a Victorian mansion on the corner of Ailesbury and Shrewsbury roads in Ballsbridge. It is next door to the Belgian embassy residence.
Behind the redbrick and granite facade – a copy of the original – it would still be hard to tell that 80 Ailesbury Road was built at the end of the 20th century. It has Victorian-style features such as deep ceiling coving and marble Adams-style fireplaces and is handsomely furnished very much in period style. The 234sq m (2,517sq ft) three-bed end-of-terrace house, with another 30sq m (305sq ft) in a converted attic, is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald for €2.75 million.
The arched redbrick entrance over the front porch opens into a tiled entrance hall with a downstairs toilet and then through double doors into an area described as a lounge hallway. It’s a good-sized L-shaped space, with wide-plank oak floors and a sofa under two windows in the gable wall. There’s space to store wine in a cupboard in the hall
The drawingroom on the right of the hall has a marble fireplace and two windows overlooking the front. The diningroom on the left is painted a dramatic shade of orangey red, has a large marble fireplace and looks out on the back garden.
The kitchen has a large island unit, a black Aga in a white-tiled chimneybreast and a window seat below a window looking into a lane beside the house. Glazed double doors open from the kitchen into a livingroom/diningroom extension that replaced a conservatory in 2009. It’s a bright, comfortable family room with a skylight, limestone fireplace and a corner of glazed doors and windows, with double doors opening out to the back garden. There’s a service hatch between the two rooms but new owners may want to look at the possibility of creating one large room from the two rooms, in line with current trends.
Upstairs, there’s a compact utility room, with a sink, room for washer and dryer and space for an ironing board next to a gable window. A family bathroom is prettily floored with colourful Moroccan tiles and part-tiled with white subway tiles.
The three bedrooms are doubles; the main bedroom at the front of the house has a walk-in dressingroom and a separate en suite with a bath and a bidet. The converted attic at the top of the house has two Velux windows and an en suite shower room with blue mosaic tiles.
The back garden has a stone patio stepping down to a neat garden well stocked with flowerbeds and bushes; a gate at the side opens into a lane off Ailesbury Road running down to a single house. The terraced houses share a common gated entrance on Ailesbury Road, but hedging separates their parking spaces.
Prices on Ailesbury Road rose and fell dramatically over the boom and bust of the past two decades – number 84 Ailesbury (a very different house to number 80) sold for more than €9 million in 2006 and for €2.5 million in 2012 . But houses on Ailesbury Road/Shrewsbury Road are still the bedrock of the upper end of the market, says agent Simon Ensor of Sherry FitzGerald.
