Angling for your attention

Tommy Barker profiles an impressive period house that's been given a rather unique revamp.

IT helps if you have an angle when selling a property in a busy market - so welcome to the house of many angles.

You can tell the architect, award winning 'bright young-ish thing' Tom de Paor, was called in from the get-go at 9 Mountpleasant Terrace, down some of the back lanes of Ranelagh, in salubrious Dublin 6.

This period house was practically rebuilt from a couple of surviving walls, and its respectful front facade is given a contorted linking glazed side extension that hints at the changes within.

The owner, a businessman has used the place as Dublin pied a terre, and it may well find as a new owner someone looking for a stylish, and different, foothold in the capital. Priced at €550,000 by Gary Jacobs of Douglas Newman Good, it is he agrees on a price and market-position par with a standard enough penthouse apartment.

Size-wise too, it compares, with just over 900 sq ft of space, cleverly used to give the maximum sense of space - by boiling the amount of rooms inside to a minimum.

So, its upper floor is essentially one large bedroom, plus shower room/wetroom, and it has a surprise barrel-shaped ceiling under its pitched roof. And, at ground level, walls were knocked back to give one open living space (each of the two large rooms at either level is approximately 24' by 11'), with the simplest of kitchens squeezed into the most complex of spaces by the newly created entrance door in the glazed extension. This add-on has rightly been compared to something you might fashion in the Oriental art of paper folding, origami - and in this case, Tom de Paor deserves a black belt in origami to mix a few esoteric Eastern disciplines.

"It is being received quite well after its first few weeks on the market, it is not a house for everyone but appeals to a specific taste in modern design," say its selling agent. "It uses real flair and imagination, with an open plan theme and extensive glazing to make this a natural light haven and a real home of character and distinction," says the DNG sales pitch. And, what must have looked so different on paper plans must have been a nightmare for a builder to deliver, and the spiralling staircase in the glazed atrium area is a slick take on an ancient design. Features include underfloor heating at the ground level (under a floor of bamboo wood), low voltage lighting and pale colours, and lots of concealed storage and surprises - such as a hidden door to the secluded back garden with an old stone wall and mature ash tree as an anchor to the past.

The place is within a five minute walk of Ranelagh village, and a few minutes too from a Luas station, and has residents' permit parking.

The architect Tom de Paor is a former British Young Architect of the Year and multi-RIAI award winner, and represented Ireland in the 2000 Venice Biennale.

His Cork work includes the Van in the National Sculpture Factory.

And, if a Tom De Paor design is to your liking, a site sale at Dublin's Liberty Lane 500 metres from St Stephen's Green might appeal to the adventurous/developers.

Full planning has been granted here for a dramatic de Paor design of four large c1,400 sq ft apartments, one with roof garden, over a commercial ground floor unit, with scope for four basement car parking spaces. The site is being sold by CB Richard Ellis Gunne for around €800,000.