Virtual home staging in Ranelagh

Ranelagh is the Dublin redbrick at its most complete. The streets off Ranelagh Road, Elmwood Avenue, Beechwood Avenue, Oakley Road, Chelmsford Road and Moyne Road, are lined with two-storey and two-over-basement Victorian terraces: redbrick fronts, granite steps to a panelled door, a bay to the front reception, a ceiling rose and a marble or slate fireplace in each of the two interconnecting rooms, and sash windows front and back. Almost every one has a return, the narrow two-storey wing off the half-landing that held the original kitchen and bathroom and has since been extended, glazed and opened to the garden by a generation of architects, so the same street holds houses with a galley kitchen at the back and houses with a twelve-metre kitchen-dining room under a roof light. Dartmouth Square and the roads towards the canal are grander, three storeys over basement, often divided into flats and now being reassembled. Around the village and along Sandford Road there are cottages, mews houses and small apartment schemes from the last thirty years. The photographs let the houses down in predictable ways: the front reception is shot with a sofa marooned in the middle, the second reception is a home office with a printer in the bay, the return kitchen is a dark corridor of cabinets, and the bedrooms still hold the last tenancy's beds. Digital decluttering clears all of that; staging then puts a sofa and armchairs at the scale the ceiling height demands, lays a dining table where the two rooms meet, and gives the return a family breakfast table so the photo shows the plan working. Brick, cornices, sashes and floorboards stay exactly as shot.

Ranelagh sits at the top of the Dublin 6 premium. A three-bed redbrick on Beechwood or Elmwood lists well above a million and rarely goes for the asking; the pattern on Daft.ie and MyHome.ie is a Saturday of viewings with a queue down the granite steps, then a bidding round that runs for weeks and closes over the guide. The buyers are senior professionals from the law firms and funds in Dublin 2, tech-sector staff from the Google and Meta campuses at Grand Canal Dock and Ballsbridge who can be at their desks in ten minutes on the Luas Green Line, families weighing Gonzaga, Sandford Park and the local national schools, and a large share of returning emigrants coming home from London, Sydney or New York with a deposit and a fortnight of viewings. Those buyers shortlist entirely from the listing, often from abroad, and a house that photographs as a rental or a building site is out before they book a flight. Supply is thin because Ranelagh houses change hands seldom, and when they do it is often probate, a downsize or the end of a tenancy, so the photographs show a departed household or nothing at all. Staging decides which of two identical redbricks gets the first bids. The property page can be shared with a buyer deciding from Boston or Berlin, staged rooms next to the originals, so the offer arrives before the viewing does.