Interior designer’s gorgeous three bed home in friendly, family-oriented Adamstown development

Asking price: €565,000

Agent: Sherry Fitzgerald

​There could be a case for renaming the Tandy’s Lane development in west Dublin’s Adamstown after one of its current residents.

While you might think it a bit of a stretch, consider that Angelina Ball has already left her indelible mark on seven or eight of the houses in the scheme, having decorated many of its show houses.

When she sells her three-bedroom, 1,250sq ft house at No 5 Tandy’s Square, where the interior designer lives with her nine-year-old daughter Sienna and 23-year-old nephew Joe, the plan is to move across the road to a slightly larger house in the same development, which she says will be her “forever home”.

Ball is the principal of her own interior design firm and online outlet designstories.ie, a company which carries out commercial and show house projects. The business operates from her back garden, where she built a design studio.

“I have, you know, my fabric library there. And I work with one other person, Jessica. She’s my right-hand woman, and even carer at times. She’s brilliant. It’s just the two of us, and that’s how I like it. She does all the admin and looks after the website and the accounting.”

Ball says she never really saw herself living in the Lucan area, but when she came out to view the houses, she was “almost taken aback” by how beautiful the surroundings were and how well put-together the development was in general.

“I’m in this kind of shoehorn of houses facing on to the square, which has beautiful old trees and picnic benches,” she says.

“I’m basically stepping out of my front door into what feels like a park. It’s like the design of the development has been really well thought-out and is very family-orientated as a result, even in terms of the WhatsApp groups we all have going. Everyone is very much involved in looking out for the kids and organising things, and I have just fallen in love with the place itself.”

Ball has thrown all of her own design nous into creating her home of the past two-and-a-half years. She says: “They have nice, high ceilings, over nine feet. And what I suppose that has allowed me to do is ‘paint-drench’ the main room. So that means, like the ceiling, all of the woodwork and all of the walls are done in the same colour. In this case, it is Rolling Fog by Little Green Paints.

“I wanted to make sure this room was really cosy, but also that it is in keeping with the modern build of the development. So I put wainscotting on the walls and got that gorgeous velvet, rust colour sofa, which is one of my favourite pieces.

“I have a beautiful round piece of art that was custom made by a lady called Lillian Ecock. And I was just thinking to myself, if I had to save anything in a fire that piece would be it.”

Ball wanted to introduce an element of curvature to ensure some of that cosiness, using elements that did not have hard edges to achieve this.

“I have a lot of curves within the room as well, and soft edges,” she says. “Like the coffee table, which is not exactly square. They have a rounder kind of edge on them. And then I have the little fake olive tree in the corner. All in all, it is minimal but cosy.”

The kitchen is off-white with shaker doors, as it came with the house, more or less. Here, Ball didn’t make any changes other than to conceal the radiator by putting timber battens up the wall, with an artwork added to make it look more stylish.

“Then I wanted to create almost a bistro kind of feel where my dining area was,” she says. “So I put some herringbone tiles at the feature wall behind my dining area, and then I took the door off the utility room and made that into a pantry, so it actually feels like an extension of the kitchen.

“What is great about these houses is that they come with these larger utility spaces. Sometimes they just end up with people throwing stuff in there. But I have really made this into a functioning space. My coffee machine is in here, and so is the microwave. I genuinely use this pantry space. It is probably one of my favourite ‘nooks’ of the house.”

Another clever use of space in Ball’s kitchen is a custom-made bench. “It’s not a big, clunky piece, it’s actually open underneath and is built from very similar timber to the radiator cover.”

Because the house is mid-terrace, there was insufficient light coming through the hallway, so Ball changed the doors to partial glass ones which now allow light into the hall from the back of the house as well as from the living room.

Elsewhere, Ball has employed designer tricks to give the illusion of more space, such as in her daughter’s bedroom where she put up a wallpaper mural from Sian Zeng.

Bell’s home has an A2 BER rating thanks to its high-efficiency windows, air-to-water heating system, mechanical ventilation, a high level of insulation and solar panels. There is off-street parking at the front with a pedestal EV charging point.

But it is not just the bricks and mortar Bell finds so attractive about Tandy’s Lane, it is the neighbours too.

“There is a very diverse group of people and as a result, Sienna has grown up with a really diverse and international group of friends. It’s one of the things I absolutely love about it.”

The train to Heuston from nearby Adamstown station is just over 20 minutes. Tandy’s Lane is about five minutes by car from Liffey Valley shopping centre among other commercial amenities. This no doubt includes a furniture removals company, the services of which Bell is unlikely to require.

Number 5 Tandy’s Square has an asking price of €565,000 with Sherry Fitzgerald.