Converting a farmyard into an equestrian centre and family home

Asking price: €1.25m

Agent: Savills (01) 618 1300​

Grand Designs wasn’t on TV in the mid-1980s, but if it had been, the story of chemistry professor Albert Pratt, his wife Iona, a renowned scientist, their two daughters and the uninhabitable farm building complex would have made for a notable edition.

Prospect House, as it is now, was ideally situated for living the renovation dream.

A listed 19th century stone complex, it stands beside Prospect Point on the inner Malahide tidal estuary, with the romantic added extra of a former bell tower.

Youngest daughter Jenny Doran says: “Even though I’m Irish, I was born in England and we lived there until I was nine.

“So I think in ’81, we came back over. My dad commuted for a couple of years from England to Ireland, then he began working at DCU, or the National Institute of Higher Education (NIHE) as it was known then.

“He was head of organic chemistry for a while, for quite a long time. My mom Iona worked for ICI in England and then she came here to work for UCD, so we moved over from England to Ireland.”

The family lived in Malahide for a time until Prospect House came on the market. It was essentially a collection of farm buildings that had belonged to the nearby Lissen Hall estate and its bell tower was reputedly used to call farm labourers to and from their work.

“It was completely derelict,” Doran says. “It belonged to the big house at the end of the road. There was a small apartment at one end of it, where the old farm manager would have resided.

“The rest of it was, you know, a hayloft, pig pens, and stables and things like that. You couldn’t have lived in the apartment. I think it had been empty since the 1970s. There was a poster of Gary Glitter on the wall.”

The whole family mucked in, visiting the site every few days, doing whatever physical jobs they could to help with the building.

“I won’t say we did a lot of the work ourselves, but we were knocking down walls and getting the ground prepared,” says Doran. “Renovation started in ’87 and it took nearly a year. We lived in a mobile home in the back for probably six, eight months. I remember staying there while I did my Inter Cert. And the we moved in before it was quite finished.”

The result was a home with a lot of space, albeit with an unusual layout. Apart from the addition of the front porch, which was built using the same materials as the original building, no material alterations were made to the listed structure.

The accommodation is set out over two floors and due to the long shape of the original building, some rooms are accessed through others.

There are six bedrooms (four doubles), an entrance hall, a study, an office, a reception room, a kitchen/living/dining room, kitchen, a living/ dining room with balcony, a large cellar and storage area.

There are two utility rooms and three bathrooms. Part of the ground floor is the separate annexe with its own entrance.

This is where the sixth bedroom, a home office and one of the living rooms are situated, with a kitchen/diner, bathroom and utility upstairs.

In front of the house is a large steel barn with three loose boxes inside, and an external stable block houses five additional stables, one of which has been set up as a wash bay and another as feed room. Doran is a lifelong horse enthusiast and does a bit of show jumping.

“When we bought the place, there were two very old barns in very bad repair, and so I took the back barn down and I built a sand arena to train the horses.

“That was about 15 years ago. I put up a new barn where I have got three very big stables and an open area for the horses to be in for getting shod and so on.”

To the front of the house is a spur of land jutting right out into the tidal estuary. “My husband does a bit of kayaking and literally, he can lift up the kayak, walk outside from the gate and put it on the water and off he goes for a couple of hours.”

To the east side of the house is a lawned area, recently landscaped and sown with a mixture of grasses and wildflowers, and surrounded by a mix of trees and hedges. Behind the sand arena are two large paddocks. “The garden is really spectacular, through my mom’s hard work,” says Doran.

Prospect House is now too big for Albert. Father and daughter in particular are naturally conflicted about leaving after such a long time. Albert is philosophical, however.

“It has been a privilege to live here,” he says. “Broadmeadow Estuary is so beautiful and the bird life spectacular. But then we’re so close to everything we need — shopping, entertainment, restaurants. And being so close to the airport has been incredibly convenient over the years.”

Iona used to travel to Europe regularly for her work at the European Food Safety Authority, so a 10 minute drive to Dublin Airport for early flights was a great bonus. Sadly she passed away in 2014.

“It has been a very difficult decision to consider moving, but the house really is too big for us now and none of us is getting any younger.

“I’ll miss everything about it and, in particular, the community that has always been supportive and welcoming. We have built so many wonderful memories here, but it’s time for another family to make some new ones.”

The aforementioned bell tower, meanwhile, is the one part of the property that has thus far eluded refurbishment.

The bell is long gone and the building is currently used only for storage. Now it awaits a new owner, perhaps for some even grander designs?

Savills is asking €1.25m.