Monagae, a Victorian house a very short walk from Dalkey village, is a beautifully maintained home that’s a bit of an original. Built in the 1860s, it was then one of just two cottages on the road: extended by its current owner a few years after moving in more than 40 years ago, it’s now a bright 135.3sq m (1,500sq ft) three- bedroom house.

Monagae, Barnhill Road, Dalkey, Co Dublin – just four doors up from the bottom of Barnhill Road – is for sale at auction on July 2nd through agent Daphne L Kaye with an AMV of €800,000.

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A rather grand entrance porch opens into a neat front hall, which halfway down has a half-glazed interior door leading to the back of the house. At the right off the hall is an airy, elegantly furnished drawingroom with high ceilings and two deep windows overlooking the front garden. A striking timber fireplace has inset blue Minton tiles.

Behind this, also to the right, is a narrow hall with built-in wardrobes; off it are two bedrooms, one of them currently used as a study. Both look over a recently-landscaped courtyard at the back of the house.

The diningroom at the rear is painted in a soft shade called greengage. Two louvred doors on either side of a timber fireplace conceal a boiler and a hotpress. A sliding glass door opens down a few steps into a bright modern livingroom which looks onto the back garden through a wall of windows. It’s a high-ceilinged room with recessed lighting and a woodburning stove made by Irish company Boru.

The modest-sized kitchen adjacent to the livingroom has green-painted units and a utility room off it. Both rooms open onto the garden, which is almost an outdoor room: steps lead up from a brick patio to a plush lawn bordered with colourful flowers, bushes and an apple tree, planted by the owner’s late husband. High stone walls seclude it from busy Barnhill Road.

Upstairs, the main blue-painted bedroom is on the return and up another steep short flight is the family bathroom. The owner, an architectural historian, points to an unusual detail at the back of a cupboard in the bathroom: a small cast-iron fireplace suggests that this might once have been a maid’s room, she says. A small landing at the top of the stairs looks over the back garden.

There’s room to park several cars at the front -- important on one of the main roads out of busy Dalkey.