Patrick Street, Portarlington, Co Laois Asking price: €465,000 Agent: Sherry FitzGerald Hyland Keating Edel Ryan must be at least a decade or so ahead of her time. Though her Portarlington home could easily be a star of RTÉ’s The Great House Revival , she bought the Patrick Street townhouse back in 2004, 14 years before the popular series featuring the renovation of period properties under the watchful eye of restoration expert Hugh Wallace first aired. Back then, purchasing a doer-upper in a rural town might have been considered unfashionable, at a time when most home buyers would have had their eye on a three-bed semi in one of the new estates sprouting up in the suburbs of burgeoning commuter towns.
But not Ryan, whose three-bedroom townhouse a few minutes walk from the centre of Portarlington now has all of the modern detail you would expect, and then some. “It was a whole load of different rooms,” she says, “I think years ago, it was divided into bedsits. We totally gutted the place, from the roof down to the source, put in new underlay, all that kind of stuff.
” The exterior of the property on Patrick Street in Portarlington Ryan transformed the former multi-unit dwelling back into a family home over the following years, replacing the plumbing, wiring and heating systems, as well as reconfiguring the living space. Whilst creating a whole new interior, she tried to be as respectful as possible to its period origins. The semi-detached townhouse now has.