An open-plan kitchen/dining/family room is the heart of a comfortable 1930s house in a quiet cul-de-sac a few minutes’ walk from Glenageary Dart station in Glenageary, Co Dublin. The owners bought 38 Villarea Park in 1985 and extended it 10 years later: now the 130sq m (1,399sq ft) semidetached five-bed is for sale through DNG for €1.4 million. It has a D1 Ber.
New owners will likely revamp parts of the house – the dated bathroom, for example – and there’s potential to expand it again into the long, sheltered back garden. There’s potential also in the floored attic and in the garage at the side of the house, used now for storage.
Red Virginia Creeper covers the front of the house. A covered front porch opens into a hall floored like most of the downstairs rooms with solid timber. The open-plan space at the back of the house is bright, with three skylights and two floor-to-ceiling windows. The kitchen area is neat, with a tiled floor, pale cream units and an island and countertops topped with polished black granite. There are bespoke built-in bookshelves here as in other rooms in the house – books are important to this family – and plenty of room for a dining table and large sofas. A side door opens on to the back garden.
An interconnecting livingroom and sittingroom are on the right of the front hall. The livingroom has a bay window – double-glazed and timber-framed, like all the windows in the house – and a distinctive pale grey 1930s period fireplace. Both rooms have picture rails and built-in bookcases; a door from the sittingroom opens into the back garden.
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There’s a small downstairs toilet, and upstairs are five bedrooms, three doubles and two singles. They have stripped pine floors and are painted in different, bright colours – deep blue, pale green, mauve. A bay window in the main bedroom matches the one in the livingroom below; another bedroom has another distinctive pale yellow 1930s period fireplace. The fifth bedroom was built on top of the garage at the side of the house; one of the two single bedrooms is fitted as an office. The family bathroom has a shower and a claw-foot bath.
The back garden is filled with attractive plants and bushes and has a large vegetable garden at the end: a conifer, bought 40 years ago at a church fete, has grown to 35ft and doesn’t shade anything, says the owner. It sits in the middle of the garden with the vegetable garden on one side: the owner grew French beans, courgettes, spinach and potatoes here. The garden ends beside an attractive high curved stone wall, with a small patio area beside it. The garden closer to the house is in lawn, and plants include a magnolia tree, lots of bamboo and a climbing hydrangea.
There’s room to park one car at the front of the house.
Villarea Park is a cul-de-sac that curves off Adelaide Road in Glenageary, ending at a pedestrian entrance on to The Metals, the walk/cycle path that runs from Dalkey to Dún Laoghaire above the rail line. Number 38 is on the part of the road that’s separated by trees from a small business park on Albert Road, so it’s not overlooked at either front or rear. It’s just a few minutes’ walk from the Dart station and a short walk to Glasthule and Sandycove villages – and about a 15-minute walk to the 40 Foot.
