A perfectly formed studio apartment in a period property that feels far more like Paris than the capital - welcome to Baggotonia.
Address: Apartment 16, 59 Pembroke Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, D04 XP22
Asking price: €350,000
Agent: Lansdowne Partnership
Small homes in Dublin that have period features, light, and space are rare. This reimagining of a big house is far more common in London or Paris, where every cubic cm of volume is utilised.
Apartment 16, number 59 Pembroke Road, Dublin 4, is in a fabled part of the capital. The pubs and bookshops of Baggotonia were filled with the writers and raconteurs of the day.
And when they weren’t in the hostelries, some of them could be found walking the quarter or contemplating nature along the banks of the Grand Canal, which is a five-minute walk from apartment 16, number 59 Pembroke Road.
Before it was Baggotonia, it was already a stomping ground for Oscar Wilde, Oliver St John Gogarty, W B Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, and an area which saw four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature stay: W B Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.
Latterly, figures who had an association with the area included Brendan Behan, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, JP Donleavy, Elizabeth Bowen, and Patrick Kavanagh.
On the canal, a bronze statue gazes into the middle distance, across at Mespil Road, a place that Patrick Kavanagh immortalised in Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin.
Raglan Road is around the corner, a street forever synonymous with his poem of the same name, about his unrequited love for one Hilda Moriarty.
Kavanagh lived for a time at number 62 Pembroke Road, and is said to have given the name Baggotonia to his bohemian surroundings, according to columnist Mary Kenny.
Now you can buy into his neighbourhood, and live across the street, just two doors down from its intersection with Raglan Road.
Number 16 is a studio apartment, one of 11 units at number 59. The Ber-exempt residence is a smartly decorated pied-à-terre that will appeal to the literati as much as to Emily in Paris fans
Extending to 40 square metres, it is set to the back of the fine period property.
Light-filled and soaked in sunshine, thanks to its south-facing aspect, it opens into a hall, with the shower room off to the right.
The living room is to the front and is an expansive space where there is an open hearth, a rare thing in an apartment in 20205, and likely to add plenty of ambiance.
The galley kitchen is tucked away in the back and has a lower ceiling height to the period scale of the sitting room.
Well laid out, with soaring ceiling heights, it amply accommodates a mezzanine bedroom, above, accessed by a glass balustraded staircase.
This is a building without a lift. The apartment comes with one parking space and shares a communal garden.
The annual service charge amounts to about €2,360 per annum.
Agents Lansdowne Partnership is seeking €350,000.
