1 week Ago
Patrick Street, Portarlington, Co Laois Asking price: €465,000 Agent: Sherry FitzGerald Hyland Keating Edel Ryan must be at least a decade or so ahead of her time. Though her Portarlington home could easily be a star of RTÉ’s The Great House Revival , she bought the Patrick Street townhouse back in 2004, 14 years before the popular series featuring the renovation of period properties under the watchful eye of restoration expert Hugh Wallace first aired. Back then, purchasing a doer-upper in a rural town might have been considered unfashionable, at a time when most home buyers would have had their eye on a three-bed semi in one of the new estates sprouting up in the suburbs of burgeoning commuter towns.
But not Ryan, whose three-bedroom townhouse a few minutes walk from the centre of Portarlington now has all of the modern detail you would expect, and then some. “It was a whole load of different rooms,” she says, “I think years ago, it was divided into bedsits. We totally gutted the place, from the roof down to the source, put in new underlay, all that kind of stuff.
” The exterior of the property on Patrick Street in Portarlington Ryan transformed the former multi-unit dwelling back into a family home over the following years, replacing the plumbing, wiring and heating systems, as well as reconfiguring the living space. Whilst creating a whole new interior, she tried to be as respectful as possible to its period origins. The semi-detached townhouse now has over 3,350sq ft of living accommodation, including four bedrooms.
Read more On the ground floor is an entrance hall and inner hall, a living room, sitting room, utility, sunroom, kitchen, dining room and living room. Upstairs, the master bedroom has an en suite bathroom and dressing room, and in the family bathroom, there is the enviable detail of a laundry chute which magically conveys your dirty clothes down to the ground-floor utility room. Ryan raised son Adam at the property, and commuted to Dublin daily by train for work.
“It’s really handy,” she says. “The station is a 25-minute walk exactly from the front door, and is really pleasant on a sunny day. But there is handy parking there too.
” The family bathroom The townhouse is well protected against the elements with its B2 BER rating, thanks in part to high-quality insulation and an air-to-water heat pump, as well as several solid fuel-burning stoves. It is bright too, thanks to intelligent positioning of roof lights. A local woman, who grew up in the town, Ryan says she is leaving reluctantly.
“To be honest with you, I really, really love the place and I am loathe to give it up,” she says. “But my son Adam is in Sligo now, and I have a grandson. I think it is time to move a bit closer to them.
I hope to find a place with a bit of space for my other ‘child’, Bella the Doberman Pincher.” My friends and my son’s friends have been in all over the years and they love the large kitchen where you can sprawl out Bella is not currently short of space. There is a lawned garden at the back, with a substantial decked area and a large garden shed.
Ryan says she found the garden really came into its own during Covid when she could have friends around at a safe distance, while kids could play on the lawn. The back garden Back inside, Ryan’s eye for colour and detail is in evidence everywhere. In the main living room is a dark blue bookcase — an epic piece of furniture which was one of the last items to be completed.
Ryan advises against rushing into things when it comes to interior details that are going to be there for a long time. “Everything that was done in the house has progressed. We were updating stuff all the time with new ideas, new colours and so on.
It really, you know, kind of went with that. But then there were original details such as the hardwood floors throughout the whole house. Everything was finished to a really high standard.
The feature bookcase in the living room “It is important to take your time and do your research. That’s really what I would think because sometimes if you’re just going by something that you see, it might not be a fit for a room. Colours and stuff you can always change easily, but major structures, you have to sit down and have a good think about.
” One of Ryan’s favourite rooms in the house is the kitchen, as well as some of the smaller ‘nooks’. “I just love it the way it is,” she says. “I am really proud of it.
My friends and my son’s friends have been in all over the years and they love the large kitchen where you can sprawl out. The kitchen/dining room "Then, by contrast, you’ve got your lovely seating area where you can have a nice, cosy conversation with somebody, you know, that is more intimate. You can hunker down and have that little bit of quiet.
” As someone who has lived there all of her life, Ryan has seen huge changes in Portarlington and in this case, it has been largely for the better. A true commuter town roughly 70km from the capital, there are up to 32 train departures for Dublin each day. Between 2006 and 2016, the population of the town roughly doubled and currently, it is just under 10,000, with over 60pc of residents owning their own homes, according to official census figures.
The rear of the property “I wouldn’t say when I was growing up there were enough amenities. There are way more now than when we were kids,” Ryan says. “And also to be honest with you, kids can get anywhere now.
They can get on a bus to Portlaoise or Tullamore easily and there are plenty of trains up and down to Dublin. It’s like everything is much more amenable.” And it doesn’t get much more ‘amenable’ than laundry chutes.
Patrick Street has an asking price of €465,000 with Sherry FitzGerald Hyland Keating. Read more.
