Number 85 Albert Road Lower is an interesting home if you’re looking to trade down but would like to continue enjoying the period features of your current property. It has enough reception rooms to entertain on a relatively large scale but not enough bedrooms to accommodate lingering boomerang children, which may be an added bonus to wannabe empty nesters.
The house was bought by Desmond O’Donohoe Fenning, grand nephew of landscape and figure painter Francis Joseph O’Donohue, an accomplished RHA artist who was killed in a motorcar incident in Ireland in 1911, becoming one of the first people to die in a car accident in Ireland.
O’Donohoe Fenning was a great friend of Buckley, of the namesake auction rooms in the village, and over the course of their friendship Buckley sold him six different homes, before he finally settled in Sandycove in 1986. The property was already subdivided at this time. The upstairs own-door apartment is accessed via Elton Park and has a different title to number 85.
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Number 85 is a 149 sq m (1,629 sq ft ) house that has plenty of living space but only two bedrooms. The asking price of €795,000, through agents Knight Frank, reflects this.
A photograph found in its attic graces the dust jacket of Ja mmet's of Dublin by Alison Maxwell and Shay Harpur, a book on the onetime hotspot in Dublin theatrical life.
The image features waiter Victor Hurding (who worked in Jammet’s for 44 years), the poet Padraic Colum, Christine Pakenham, Lady Longford, and Micheál MacLiammoir.
They are seated in front of a wall panel entitled The Four Seasons by a painter known as Bossini, who is reputed to have produced a number of panels for the Jammet brothers to settle a debt in the first restaurant which was located on St Andrew's Street.
The photograph was part of a job lot that son Roderic Charles Fenning sold to Whyte’s Irish Art and Collectible Auctions.
The house has fine reception rooms to the front. The drawing room is a pair of interconnecting rooms with French doors to the rear and a similar-sized window to the front, doric pillars and fine high ceilings with picture rails. Across the hall is a square-shaped diningroom let down a little by the mustard 1940s tiled deco style fireplace that is not original to the house. These rooms have 9ft ceilings but are painted in a terracotta red that drinks much of the natural light.
The two bedrooms are to the rear; one is housed in the older part of the property and so benefits from the high ceilings, but the deep racing green that adorns the walls make it feel far smaller than it could be.
A sunnier bedroom but with a ceiling height of only 7ft is to its rear.
At the back of the house there is a cosy sittingroom with a wood-burning stove, also with French doors outside.
The gardens around the house belong to number 85 and the patio area to the side of the kitchen is west-facing and fronting onto Elton Park.
There is off-street parking for numerous cars.
