Address: Tudor Lodge, South Hill Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin
Price: €4,950,000
Agent: Sherry FitzGerald
An early Victorian house just off Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock, Co Dublin, is full of surprises – and one of the biggest is that it’s a semidetached house. Whether standing in the entrance driveway or in the large private back garden, it’s hard to see its other half.
Inside, the 470sq m (5,059sq ft) six-bed has a mix of elegant formal reception rooms and comfortable family spaces, including a sleek modern kitchen/breakfast/garden room and, up a nearly hidden staircase, a 29sq m (313sq ft) artist’s studio.
One of the owners of Tudor Lodge is an artist and it shows in the attention to detail – pelmets in the main bedroom that copy a design detail in the drawingroom mantelpiece, for example, and a coffee table made from a large gilt-framed mirror.
Built around 1838, Tudor Lodge, a two-storey-over-garden-level house on South Hill Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin, has been a family home for the owners and their five children for the past 26 years.
When they bought it before auction in 1999, for €2.5 million, it was deemed one of the most expensive houses sold in Dublin that year. Since then, the period house, extended and modernised, has featured in Image magazine and The Irish at Home, a book on Irish interiors.
It’s now for sale for €4.95 million through Sherry FitzGerald. As a protected structure, it’s Ber exempt.
Former owners include Penneys/Primark founder, the late Arthur Ryan, and his wife, singer Alma Carroll. Tudor Lodge’s barely visible semidetached neighbour has long been occupied by the religious Order of St Camillus. That house, previously known as Netley, was once the home of Eoin MacNeill, Irish scholar, politician and one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers.
Wide French doors from a recently-built garden room in Tudor Lodge fold back to open into a landscaped back garden designed by Andrew Glenn-Craigie; it includes a floodlit well-maintained tennis court. The house sits on 0.75 acres and the tennis court by itself could potentially accommodate another house or houses.
Neither the owners nor the agent are thinking of development but “while it’s likely to appeal strongly as a family home, there is always development potential subject to planning,” says agent Rena O’Kelly, “and it offers flexibility depending on a purchaser’s vision.”
Front hall 
Drawingroom 
Diningroom 
Garden room 
Garden
Tudor Lodge – a name shared by many other houses in south county Dublin – has Tudor-style steeply pitched gable roofs and leaded windows in most rooms. The owners extended it soon after moving in to provide more bedrooms at the top of the house. “They were all little babies then, I wanted them on the same floor as us,” says one of the owners.
The front door of Tudor Lodge opens into a porch, then an entrance hall which is floored with a lovely herringbone-pattern oak parquet, as are the drawingroom on the left and diningroom on the right. The long drawingroom is bright, with three windows, one a deep bay. It’s decorated in shades of cream and beige and has its original pale marble mantelpiece. The diningroom has a matching mantelpiece in black marble.
[ ‘Upside-down’ home built for its views from Dublin Bay to Killiney BayOpens in new window ]
The house then unfolds over several levels: while four bedrooms are upstairs, there are two downstairs. A few steps down from the entrance hall there’s a double guest bedroom and a family bathroom with bath and shower.
But the surprise is the number of rooms at the garden level of the house. A livingroom has a wide-plank timber floor, fireplace with cast-iron inset and a richly decorated wooden door from Morocco leading to a door into the garden and a path to a pedestrian gate to South Hill Avenue. There’s also a smart double bedroom with an en suite at garden level, and a good-sized utility room.
A family room off a hall leading to the kitchen is bright: glazed French doors fold back, opening into it, and a large internal picture window looks back into the kitchen/breakfastroom. This is split level: a long Poggenpohl galley kitchen floored with limestone is bright, with a long atrium above it. The breakfastroom, a few steps up, looks over it.
From here, doors open on to a steep narrow staircase that leads to the timber-floored studio with a pitched roof and two Velux windows: it’s filled with the artist owner’s artwork. The wide garden room with an oak floor at the back of the house was built in 2023. It has a glazed roof and floor-to-ceiling French doors that open back, making it an indoor/outdoor room.
There are four double bedrooms at the top of the house and a family bathroom. The main bedroom has a herringbone parquet floor, three large, leaded windows and a dramatic pale-grey velvet button-back headboard with an arched white-painted frame. There’s a step up to the en suite shower room with a skylight and double sink.
There are three limestone-paved patio areas in the large back garden, which is mostly in lawn and sheltered by high hedges – there are no two-storey houses nearby looking into it. A separate building at the side of the house is currently used as a gym but could be a home office. The floodlit Savanna tennis court has been regularly used and maintained by the family.
A door at the very back of the garden in a wooded area opens into the Clonfadda Wood development off Mount Merrion Avenue. A large gravelled driveway with plenty of room for parking behind electronic gates at the front of the house is bordered by very mature tall trees and a wide curve of lawn.
Main bedroom 
Family room 
Kitchen/breakfastroom 
Studio 
Tudor Lodge, South Hill Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin