Boho redbrick suited to both artists and families, with studio space in garden room and vehicular rear access on South Circular Road.
Address: 195 South Circular Road, Dublin 8, D08 E0P8
Asking price: €1.15 million
Agent: Owen Reilly
Your home should tell the story of your life. Just beyond the National Stadium, on the sunny side of the South Circular Road, is a handsome red brick that has been decorated in a relaxed, bohemian fashion.
The look is a mash-up of cowhide rugs, mid-century pieces, and forever furniture with a high degree of functionality throughout.
The bay-fronted, terraced house is owned by artist Tríona Sweeney, founder of Art School and her husband David O’Brien, who works in med tech.
They met at the National College of Art (NCAD), where she was studying, and he was running the students’ union and bonded on protest marches against a proposal to move the Thomas Street campus out to Carysfort.
They paint together in the studio that they built at the foot of the garden, and their work is on the walls throughout the house.
The portraits are his, she says.
Her work is more abstract and represents moving spaces, she explains.
When they bought the house, it was in bedsits, and they have gently rehabilitated it.
It is now a three-bedroom, four-bathroom property.
"We didn’t want it to be overly done", she explains.
“We salvaged flooring from upstairs to replace boards downstairs.”
This was so the floorboards could be exposed at entrance level.
“It was an organic way of building it back up,” she explains. The look is slightly tousled, not mapped out millimetre by millimetre.
“We travel quite a bit, and everything in the house tells a story.”
The narrative starts in Falcarragh, Co Donegal, where her parents set up shop when they came back from San Francisco.
Sweeney’s General Drapery stocked all the latest fashions, and some pieces from the family home can be seen in their home.
A shop sign resides in the kitchen.
The sign was two-sided, so Tríona and her brother, the luxury handbag designer and maker, Pauric Sweeney, took one side each as a keepsake.
There are examples in the garden room too.
A brass-topped side table, for example, along with a trunk, still bearing her mother’s maiden name, Nolan, that now serves as a coffee table.
In the living room, a pair of black candlesticks on the mantle came from the Donegal Gaeltacht house.
The laid-back atmosphere begins as you cross the threshold.
The house opens into a hall with intricate plasterwork and their art on the walls.
It has two interconnecting reception rooms, both washed in light.
In the living room is an espresso-tanned leather sofa, “a battered Swedish piece,” is how she describes it, that they spotted in the window of a shop on Francis Street and stopped the car to buy it.
The couple extended the property, pushing the kitchen out and adding a new garden room into part of the south-west facing garden.
This is now a broken plan space.
The dining table came from an army barracks.
They found it at The Store Yard in Portlaoise.
From the garden room, double doors open out to the well-planted and private exterior.
The cedar cladding of the extension matches the creeper-clad timber of the studio.
This is where Sweeney holds her art classes, which are a mix of online and in-person lessons. The space could also be used as a playroom or music room for kids.
While the couple relish the 172 square metres of space, the C2 Ber-rated house gives them the property is also perfectly set up for family life.
On the return is the first of its three double bedrooms, currently used as a home office.
There’s also a bathroom and laundry room at this level.
This puts an end to having to traipse up and down the stairs with dirty and clean clothes, which most households have to endure.
The rest of the accommodation is on the first floor and is en suite.
The principal bedroom spans the width of the property, where a large kimono hangs decoratively from one of the walls.
In it a half wall that divides the slumber section from the wardrobe and ensuite.
There is vehicular rear access to the rear onto Donore Avenue, a boon for drivers.
In many ways, there is no need for a car here.
Kids could walk or cycle to any of the nearby schools, and the public transport bus links along the SCR are excellent.
You can be in the city centre in less than 10 minutes. On foot, it will take about 30 minutes.
