Address: Leconfield, Silchester Road, Glenageary, Co Dublin
Price: €3,450,000
Agent: Sherry FitzGerald
A grand Victorian house in Glenageary, Co Dublin, owned by one family for more than 50 years, has been well cared for and has most of its handsome period details intact. Leconfield on Silchester Road sits on 0.6 acres with a large back garden.
A contemporary refurbishment sympathetic to the home’s Victorian features would create a show-stopping home on this sought-after stretch. The property could also interest a developer as three or four houses could possibly be built on the site, subject to planning permission, agent Jacqui McCabe suggests, as happened at Tanglewood, a similar Victorian property further down the road.
Leconfield, a 356sq m (3,834sq ft) semidetached five-bedroom home built in the 1870s, is now for sale through Sherry FitzGerald, seeking €3.45 million.
Among its features are its grand front hall, with elaborate cornicing and centre roses, two drawingrooms with large bay windows on both the ground and first floors and a self-contained two-bedroom apartment at garden level.
Its gardens have been carefully maintained: a wide lawn has mature trees and lots of shrubs and at its end winds around the bottom of the neighbouring garden. Its particularly wide side garden could provide access for development. Leconfield is beside the Lord’s Walk, a lane leading from Silchester Road to the Metals, the path that leads above the Dart line from Dún Laoghaire to Dalkey.
The first-floor drawingroom 
Ground-floor drawingroom 
Ground-floor diningroom 
Ground-floor kitchen 
The back garden offers plenty of potential
The owner was a senior Irish diplomat and Leconfield set the scene of many dinner parties attended by politicians, civil servants and business people. The family lived abroad for many years, staying in the flat on annual visits as the upstairs part of the house was let.
One of his children remembers “playing in the garden, playing dress-up games in the big room upstairs when we lived there full time, finding a quiet place to read behind the sofa in the front bay window of the drawingroom”.
More recently, the owners’ grandchildren “loved visiting granny and grandpa and spending many happy times there exploring the house and garden… The house is full of beautiful natural light and trees are visible from most of the windows”, their daughter says. She imagines/hopes that new owners will “merge the flat and house and create a modern comfortable living space while preserving the beautiful original features” as new owners of Hughenden, the house next door, did after buying that house in 2016. Hughenden sold for €2.1 million, according to the Property Price Register.
Wide granite steps lead from the gravelled front garden into a black-and-white floored vestibule. Double doors with glass panels – bordered by coloured glass – open into the front hall, which has a 13ft-high ceiling, rich ceiling cornicing, centre roses and a tall sideboard set into a recess with a plasterwork arch above it.
The front hall 
The main bedroom 
The bathroom on the first floor
A door on the left opens into a drawingroom, which has two very tall deep bay windows, deep coving and elaborate cornicing, a centre rose and a black marble fireplace with a coal-effect gas fire and pretty tiles inset. A door from here opens into a smaller diningroom which has a white marble fireplace and a door leading back into the front hall.
There is a toilet towards the end of the hall next to a storeroom that occupies a space where originally steps led down to garden level – these could be reinstated. There’s a kitchen at the back of the house, with a utility room off it; a side door from here opens on to steps down to the garden.
Upstairs, there’s a double bedroom on the first return with a Jack-and-Jill en suite (ie its doors open from the bedroom and from the landing). A few steps lead to the first floor where there’s a double bedroom which looks over the Lord’s Walk lane.
A large room at the front of the house is the second drawingroom. Stretching across the width of the house, it has three windows, two of these wide deep bays matching the windows in the drawingroom below. New owners could turn this room into a large double bedroom with an en suite, perhaps a walk-in wardrobe. There’s another double bedroom on the second floor at the top of the house beside a shower room and separate toilet.
There’s separate outside access to the garden-level apartment. It has a large livingroom with a brick fireplace, two bedrooms, a good-sized kitchen/breakfastroom, toilet and mostly-tiled bathroom. All the bathrooms in the house have been relatively recently modernised.
The livingroom in garden-level apartment 
The kitchen/breakfastroom in the apartment 
The apartment’s bathroom
There’s plenty of room to park in Leconfield’s front garden behind black cast-iron gates. The house is nearly opposite Glenageary Lawn Tennis Club. It is not a protected structure, but is in an Architectural Conservation Area. It has a Ber rating of F. Near the Adelaide Road end of Silchester Road, it’s a fairly short walk to Glenageary Dart station.