What a joy it was to hear children laughing and playing in the schoolyard again after months of eerily quiet lockdown, says the owner of Innisfáil, 6 Bushy Park Road, which is across the road from Zion parish church and national school beside Rathgar village in Dublin 6.
The church spire is lit up at night, exuding a warm glow through the front windows of this fine Victorian house. The current owners bought it after auction in 2006 for a sum considerably higher than the AMV of €3.5 million and undertook a comprehensive refurbishment, replumbing and rewiring job of such quality that the works they completed in 2008 at a cost of about €700,000 give the 120-year old property a C1 Ber.
As well as ensuring the works would future-proof the 376sq m (4,050sq ft) house, the engineer owner designed a three-storey extension to the rear, making use of the southerly light without impinging on the 150ft garden. The plan reconfigured it from a six-bed to a four-bed, turning smaller bedrooms in the old part into en suite bathrooms for the two new bedrooms in the extension.
Up the wide granite steps, the door opens into a bright square hall with a pretty arched stained-glass window. To the left are two enormous reception rooms, the front with two windows looking across to the church and the rear used as a formal dining room. There are folding doors to close them off, though when they’re open you can admire the matching marble fireplaces and plasterwork.
Most period features were intact, but the restoration included taking a mould of the ceiling rose in the dining room to make a new one for the front. With 12ft ceilings, there was plenty of capacity to add under-floor geothermal heating throughout and not lose any of the airy feel.
The grand scale continues upstairs, with the main bedroom at the front benefitting from a walk-in wardrobe and spacious en suite made from another small bedroom. The guest bedroom at the back, like the two bedrooms in the extension, looks across the garden and the green of High School’s playing fields to the mountains. All the bathrooms are very well fitted out and have natural light.
At garden level, there is good storage under the front steps and a study looks out to the cobblelocked garden with mature birch and cherry trees. Next to this is a cosy TV room, and there’s a guest bathroom floored, like most of the downstairs, in Travertine stone.
There’s a hint of another appeal of this house from the lower hall, with views through to the garden from one of the two ways into the extended L shape of the kitchen/living room. The kitchen end, full of timeless vanilla gloss units with a sparkly stone worktop, is very bright, given that it’s now an internal room, and the long axis spans the back of the house, with space for dining at one side and lounging at the other. A utility/boot room opens out to the side passage and the long south-facing garden. There is a wide flagged patio, and lots of scope here for more planting, and even a garden room.
On buying the house, the owners were told Michael Collins stayed a night here during the War of Independence but, having reared their children here very happily, they have more long-term aspirations for the next family. It’s well set up for them, within sight and sound of so many schools as well as lots of shops, restaurants, parks and sports clubs, and almost no work to do on the house. Innisfáil is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald with an asking price of €3.25 million.
