In this weather, all anyone wants is to be beside the seaside, where cooling sea breezes chill the record temperatures.
Made up in part of railway carriages, Sea House will have you daydreaming. Just don’t expect an A rating, the agent says.
A seaside home with a Wexford feel that is within an easy commute of Dublin city centre is on many wish lists.
There is Brittas, of course, Ireland’s answer to France’s Riviera hotspots, Villerfranche-sur-Mer or Menton. But it is further afield, far more populated, and a lot ritzier. Caravans and chalets here still change hands for telephone numbers.
Address: Sea House, Sea Road, Kilcoole, Wicklow, A63 HR96
Asking price: €285,000
Agent: JP & M Doyle Ltd. Terenure
For this money, you get the same kind of expanse of the Irish Sea, a lot closer to Dublin.
The train station is a scenic 750 metre walk away, and the Dublin Connolly to Rosslare Europort train runs six times a day, Monday to Friday, and three times a day on Saturdays and Sundays.
Sea House does exactly what its name says. It’s a property by the sea. While the water is literally across the tracks, don’t even think of taking a shortcut.
In the opposite direction to the train station, the house is just 460 metres from a safe entrance to the beach.
The construction of the property is unusual. It comprises several train or tram carriages linked together to create rooms.
The front of the property looks like a dance hall with corrugated metal sheeting on either side of the front door porch. The walls are painted a vanilla white. Behind the blue door is a large hall that behaves like a platform of sorts.
Three carriages are set perpendicular to each other around this hall. Step into the one to the right of the front door, and your destination is a bedroom. Take the carriage that is opposite the front door, and you're in the dining carriage. The carriage to the left is where the kitchen is.
Built onto this compartment are a living room and a second bedroom. This part of the property is block construction and was built sometime in the 1940s, according to selling agent David Doyle.
Extending to about 90 square metres, Sea House is set on 0.27 acres of mature gardens, including cordylines and lilies with established planting and shrubbery giving the property natural shelter and privacy.
The back of the house is west-facing and also gets good southern light, making its cobbled patio a wonderful suntrap.
It is very unlikely that the next owner will maintain the current kooky set-up. Agent Doyle says it is likely the buyer will try to get planning permission for a two-storey property and use it as a weekend retreat.
BER-exempt, "it’d be far from an A-rating," Doyle says. And you could build a Miami-style modernist mansion, if money is no object.
But part of its innate charm is the fact that someone saw the potential in this low-fi seaside location and brought generations of their family to escape here and to enjoy long summer holidays and weekends in a really simple set-up.
There is merit in that. The family still uses it during the summer months.
Dreamers would love to know that the next owners choose to live in it for a while as it is, to see its charm and how they might repurpose the carriages into the property’s next iteration.
It would be a shame to lose that sense of provenance.
JP & M Doyle, Terenure, is seeking €295,000 for the property, which is 7.5 kilometres south of chichi Greystones.
