The privacy of a mews house built around 1981 in a Sandycove cul-de-sac was what appealed to Garratt Sullivan and his wife Sheila when they bought it in 2000. The detached house, accessed down a long driveway near the bottom of Arkendale Road, is quiet too, he says, even though its garden backs onto the Metals, the pedestrian footpath that runs beside the Dart line.

An Grianan, 6A Arkendale Road, is a detached 177sq m (1,900sq ft) four-bedroom house, for sale for €1.275 million through Sherry FitzGerald.

Built by the late psychologist and journalist Patricia Redlich and the architect Brian Brennan, An Grianan's style is modern. A driveway beside one of the redbrick Victorian houses that line this side of Arkendale Road leads through a carport to the front of An Grianan, a brown brick house with only two small windows in its exterior north-facing wall.

Full of light

Inside, however, the house is full of light, with floor-to-ceiling windows downstairs and Velux windows in bedrooms at the front of the house upstairs. It’s warm too: there are double-glazed Rationel windows throughout and underfloor heating upstairs and down beneath quarry-tiled floors. There are four heating zones upstairs, explains Sullivan, five downstairs, with controls concealed behind a panel in one of the bedrooms.

The front hall is particularly bright, with a window from the top to the bottom of the house at the end overlooking the rear garden. A utility room and downstairs toilet open off it.

The diningroom to the left has two floor-to-ceiling windows and a door out to the back garden.

A wall of glass looks onto the back garden from the open-plan livingroom, which opens directly into the galley-style kitchen at the front of the house. Two doors at the side open into a rather old-fashioned sunroom at the side of the house.

Outdoor room

The paved back garden is effectively an outdoor room, with a pretty water feature and fish pond and a raised bedding area filled with plants. There are plum, apple, pear and cherry trees here, and very mature trees in the private front garden.

Of the four bedrooms upstairs, three are doubles; here also is a family bathroom. The main bedroom has an ensuite, a small dressing area and sliding glass doors onto an outside terrace. A bedroom at the front of the house – once a teenager’s room – also has a mezzanine accessed by a pull-down ladder.