When you live so near Herbert Park, why would you want a back garden? ask the owners of 7 Pembroke Park. The five-bedroom Victorian semi-detached house, for sale through Bergins at €1.65 million, has room outside: a sunny courtyard, with a water feature that came home from an award-winning garden at the Chelsea Flower Show one year.
“Young or old, Herbert Park is a wonderful place,” the owner says, sharing memories of children playing ball, running about and generally letting off steam in one of Dublin’s loveliest green spaces.
The current owners bought the house just over 10 years ago, when they were looking to downsize, “but we fell in love with the place, from the moment we stepped into the hallway”.
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It is a lovely place too. The double-height hall has a feature stained glass window, and a wooden staircase that curves up through three levels. It’s spacious as well.
Each of the five bedrooms is a double. One, at the very top of the house, is en suite. But on the first floor one of the bathrooms could easily be re- configured and swapped around to give a pair of en suites on this level without losing a bedroom.
No 7 is a house with a history. Samuel Beckett’s grandfather built it, back in the 1880s, and somewhat more recently, anyone applying for a US visa would once have visited.
Rewired and replumbed
Previously the house was a doctor's practice, which had one of the first X-ray machines in Ireland. Alarmed by the potential spread of TB, anyone wanting a visa to the US had to come here first for a chest X-ray.
Rewired and replumbed when the present owners bought it, the house is also freehold which is quite unusual for this area.
To the right of the entrance hall, the drawing room has a big bay window (echoed in the charming master bedroom upstairs), and an open fire.
Concertina wooden doors lead through to an elegant family room, which has a coal-effect gas fire for convenience, though still in the original fireplace.
The street is quiet, and sitting in the dining area of the deliciously sunny kitchen, or around the granite-topped breakfast bar, you could easily be in the middle of the countryside rather than just a step from Leeson Street and Donnybrook village.
French windows lead out to the back patio space.
Downsizing for real this time, now that their children have all left home, the owners are staying in the area. “We couldn’t leave,” they say, describing it as “the best location we’ve ever lived in”.
There’s off-street parking to the front, which also has mature planting and an interesting topiary hedge.
Just down the road, 33 Pembroke Park, which at 196sq m (2,110sq ft) and with four bedrooms, is smaller than No 7’s 230sq m (2,476sq ft), sold in July this year for €1.45 million.
