Leahy's Terrace, Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland

 

This "fine, well-positioned Victorian terrace" house in a Dublin suburb has a claim to fame. Author James Joyce slept here. Well, no, not really, but he did walk around the neighborhood a little bit-- more on that later.

This is the neighborhood. The house's drawing room window faces St. Mary's, Star of the Sea Church. 

I'll intersperse listing photos with stills I captured from a more recent video, so we can see more details. For example, the front door isn't blue any more. It's black, and its neighbor is pink:

It has 2,564 square feet or 249 square meters, with two stories over a basement. The listing doesn't say when it was built, but its neighbor at #1 Leahy's Terrace was built around 1911.

The drawing room and dining room both have white marble fireplaces. Here is the drawing room both unfurnished and furnished:

Here's how I would want to furnish it:

{Jeremy Langmead/Susan Deliss}

Here is the adjoining dining room, unfurnished and furnished:

Here's how it could be, if we continued to take inspiration from Jeremy Langmead and Susan Deliss:

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Rounding out the tour of the hall level is this bedroom with attached bathroom:

The stairs to the basement level open onto the kitchen.

It's been renovated with new cabinets and stone countertops and is open to the garden. 

Here's what it used to look like:

This is the basement level family room as it was before the reno...

...and now with the fireplace wall remodeled and painted to coordinate with the sleek new kitchen:

Here's a glimpse of the bedroom and and attached bath for this level:

The top story has also been renovated.

The original two bedrooms are now a roomy master suite which runs the width of the house:

If they were mine, I'd be layering in more of Susan Deliss' beautiful textiles and popping in a copper tub:

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Then, I could invent stories about how James Joyce used that copper tub when he stayed in the house.

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The village of Sandymount celebrates Joyce with walking tours, inspired by this passage from Ulysses:

They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, Frauenzimmer: and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand. source

He didn't mean our Leahy's Terrace house steps. He was describing those splayed and flabby feet on the steps down to Sandymount Strand: 

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The Martello tower there was built by the British around 1804. They were worried about an invasion by Napoleon. There were originally 2 cannons on its roof. After Napoleon was no longer a threat, the locals weren't quite sure what to do with it. The tower was once used as a tram terminus, and later as a cafe that sold ice cream out the window, but now it's just an interesting spot for tourists.

By the way, there's another tower in nearby Sandycove that serves as the James Joyce museum, since it was featured in Ulysses also. Apparently, unlike our Leahy's Terrace house, he actually did sleep there.

The listing is here. The Youtube tour is here.