Virtual home staging in Rathmines

Rathmines was Dublin's flatland for most of the twentieth century, and its housing stock still tells that story. The grand streets, Leinster Road, Belgrave Square, Kenilworth Square, Grosvenor Square and the upper end of Rathmines Road, were built as three and four storey Victorian houses for the professional class, redbrick or rendered, with granite steps, fanlights and reception rooms of real height. Most were divided into flats and bedsits after the war. The pre-63 houses, subdivided before the 1963 Planning Act, still come to market as investments of six or eight units, and the 2013 bedsit standards pushed many of their landlords to sell. Some are now being bought back as family homes, others sold on as period conversions of one and two bedrooms: some with the original cornice and a marble fireplace, some with a kitchen in an alcove and a bedroom in a former hall. Behind the squares, Castlewood Avenue, Leinster Square and the streets towards Rathgar hold two-storey redbrick terraces very like Ranelagh's, with the same bays and returns. Along Rathmines Road there are flats over the shops and newer schemes near the Swan Centre. Photographs go wrong in flatland ways: a period conversion shot with the previous tenant's furniture, a former drawing room split by a stud wall that the picture makes look temporary, a basement flat photographed at its darkest hour, a bay full of storage boxes. Digital decluttering clears the tenancy out of each room; staging then furnishes a conversion so its one big room reads as a home rather than a rental, and a whole house so each floor has a purpose again. Cornices, fireplaces and sashes stay exactly as photographed.

Rathmines is the entry point to Dublin 6. It carries a discount to Ranelagh next door, though not a large one, and it draws the same buyers: professionals in their thirties who rented in the district and want to stay, couples trading a two-bed conversion for a redbrick terrace, families pulled by the schools around Kenilworth Square, and returning emigrants who want the canal walk into Dublin 2 and cannot be talked into the suburbs. On Daft.ie and MyHome.ie a conversion in a period house lists in the mid hundreds of thousands and a whole house on Leinster Road or Belgrave Square well over a million, and both usually end in a bidding round. The particular Rathmines dynamic is the stock in between: pre-63 houses and ex-rental flats arriving straight from tenancies as landlords leave, sold either as an investment or to a buyer who will spend two years turning the building back into a house. Those listings are photographed with tenants' belongings, coin meters and fire doors, and the buyer has to imagine the drawing room through them. The same house staged as the family home it will become, or the conversion staged as the flat someone would choose to live in, moves the listing from the investor column to the owner-occupier column, where the bids are higher. The originals stay on the listing beside the staged images, so nothing about the building's condition is hidden.