The unsuccessful 12-year-long battle to save Frescati House, United Irishman Edward FitzGerald’s 18th-century family home in Blackrock, Co Dublin, was one of Ireland’s best-known conservation planning rows. Frescati Estates, a company owned by the directors of Roches Stores, had been given permission by then Dún Laoghaire Corporation to demolish it in 1970. A campaign to save the beautiful and architecturally significant house began in 1971 but failed and in 1983, it was demolished. Frascati Shopping Centre was built on the site, complete with divergent spelling.
A terrace of five houses around the corner at the bottom of Mount Merrion Avenue, owned by Mecca International Limited, escaped the same fate. Four of the five, built around 1800, fell into disrepair and had been rented when the current owners bought their home, 12 Mount Merrion Avenue, in 1994. They lived in Dundrum but had always wanted a period home: one of the owners, an engineer, wasn’t daunted by undertaking to restore it.
Now number 12 Mount Merrion Avenue, the 213sq m (2,292 sq ft) double-fronted four/five-bedroom midterrace house is for sale through Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty for €1.65 million. It has gas-fired central heating but as a protected structure is not required to have a Ber rating. It has been a comfortable family home for the owners, but their three children grown, they’re ready to downsize.
The house is two-storey over-garden level with a four-storey extension at the back – the main change the owners made to the Regency period house, apart from basics that included rewiring, re-roofing and replumbing. This was done to leave the main rooms of the original house intact, with space for a utility room at garden level in the extension, a study at the next level, a family bathroom and a luxurious en suite with the main bedroom at the top of the house. Original period details – fireplaces, doors, flooring, window shutters – were kept and repaired where possible or replaced. All the stripped pine doors in the house, for example, are original.
Steep steps lead up to a glossy deep-blue front door with a stained-glass fanlight opening into a front hall with original stripped pine floors.
The drawingroom on the right has deep-red walls, a fireplace with timber surround and tiled inset, sash windows and working shutters. Sash windows at the front look over the front garden on to busy Mount Merrion Avenue, the window at the back over the back garden across to the Frascati Shopping Centre car park.
The elegant diningroom on the other side of the hall has a cast-iron fireplace painted white with tiles inset; like the drawingroom, it’s dual-aspect.
Stairs at the end of the hall lead down to an office – which could be a bedroom – on the first return, with slender double doors cleverly crafted by the owner, who did a lot of the work on the house himself. Stairs lead down from here to the garden level of the house, also accessed from a below-stairs entrance.
On one side of the hall is a smart modern Kestrel kitchen, installed just before Covid: a long island in the centre with built-in storage and seating for five, is topped, like the counters, with pale quartz. An Aga sits beneath a carved mantel and there’s a Quooker tap over the stainless-steel sink; kitchen units are painted a Farrow & Ball pale grey/green and the floor has the same pale Italian tiles as the hall. A few steps at the end of the kitchen lead down to a well-fitted utility room, with a sink, quartz-topped counter, cupboards – and a 300-litre hot water tank. There’s a beer fridge just off the utility room and a good-sized cupboard. A glazed door opens off the kitchen into a small sunroom that opens through French doors into the back garden.
On the opposite side of the garden level hall from the kitchen is a cosy family room with a wood-burning stove and built-in bookshelves. A glazed door opens into a sunroom the same size as that off the kitchen: it serves as storage for garden tools at present. There’s a downstairs toilet in the hall.
The smart family bathroom was installed five or six years ago. It’s on the return upstairs from the main front hall, through a handsome arch with a stained glass fanlight. Fully-tiled, it has a large step-in shower and underfloor heating.
Upstairs are four bedrooms: two small doubles, one single and the large main bedroom, which runs from the front to the back of the house. All have built-in wardrobes. There’s access to the attic with a pull-down ladder from the bedroom. The main bedroom’s en suite, up a few steps from the bedroom, is particularly smart. It has a shower, large double Jacuzzi bath and a long white counter with two sinks. An arched window in the en suite looks over the back garden, the lane behind the terrace and Frascati shopping centre’s car park.
The walled and private back garden is relatively small with steps leading up to a space with a large patio. There’s a parking space at one side (with an EV charger) and a sliding electronic back gate opening on to the lane which runs behind the terrace off Frascati Park road. (Lislea is a private lane leading into a small estate to which no 12’s owners have access.) The owners also rent a car space on the lane and have residents’ permit parking for roads nearby.
There are a couple of mature trees and a lawn in the railed front garden. The house, close to the junction of the Blackrock bypass and Mount Merrion Avenue, is a few minutes’ walk from the Frascati centre and Blackrock Village Centre shopping centres, Blackrock Park and an easy walk to Blackrock Dart station.
