The House That Knew Yeats Is Now For Sale in Killiney

There are houses with views. Then there are houses that have seen. Palermo, a storied Victorian villa set into the wooded heights of Killiney, South Dublin, is the latter: a rare Irish residence that has not merely existed through history but has quietly hosted it.

Built in the mid-19th century by the Hone family, central figures in Ireland’s cultural flowering, Palermo was once a hive of conversation, correspondence, and creativity, perched like a sentinel above Dublin Bay.

Now offered for private sale, Palermo presents a rare opportunity to own one of Killiney's most historically and architecturally significant homes.

Where the Literary Revival Slept, Dined, and Dreamed

Few properties can claim to have shaped, and been shaped by, the minds of a national literary movement.

Fewer still have left architectural fingerprints of those minds in their very bones. Palermo does both. Joseph M. Hone, biographer of W.B. Yeats and friend to Jack B. Yeats, wrote from here.

Letters sent from Palermo still sit in the National Gallery of Ireland, echoing the dialogues once shared across its timber-panelled halls.

Joyce, the Gore-Booth sisters, Countess Markievicz, and even Harry Clarke weren’t merely visitors; they were contributors to the ongoing creative fugue that Palermo embodied.

A stained-glass window believed to be by Evie Hone still casts fractured rainbows onto the main stairwell, turning time into colour.

Walking here is drifting through the soft haze of Ireland's cultural memory, yet nothing about Palermo feels preserved or embalmed. It lives.

Resurrected, Not Renovated

Today, after an exhaustive restoration that balances reverence with refinement, Palermo has returned not as a museum piece but as a living, luminous residence.

Its Italianate curves have been gently coaxed back to grandeur. The original sash windows now conceal high-performance replicas; parquet floors once muted by decades of dust now sing beneath sunbeams.

A full-width balcony overlooks the bay, as if offering Dublin's coastline a toast each morning.

Inside, Rhatigan & Hick's bespoke kitchen is a masterclass in restraint and craftsmanship, designed by Roisin Lafferty to feel both contemporary and eternal. Double French doors open to the sea air.

The drawing room, framed by a three-window bay, becomes a theatre of weather, light, and sea. Every room has a memory. Every floorboard remembers a footstep you haven’t taken yet.

A House for a Modern Patron

The offering includes The Mews, a fully detached, A-rated residence crafted from the former stables.

With its own sunroom, spiral staircase, and SMEG-kissed kitchen, it functions as a home within a home, ideal for visiting artists, extended family, or a live-in archivist to catalogue the inevitable ephemera of inspiration.

The gardens, a terraced acre of southeast-facing tranquillity, have been sculpted with a poet’s eye.

Sunken garden rooms, clipped hedges, and winding stone paths lead the curious down through green rooms of solitude, out to a hidden pedestrian gate, and onward to the sea.

The Future of the Past

Palermo isn’t protected by a formal heritage listing, a paradoxical freedom that invites its next custodian not to preserve the past in amber, but to continue it.

It is a legacy in motion, a stage set for the next act in Ireland’s cultural narrative. Here, you don’t just purchase square footage. You acquire resonance.

So, who will live here next? A writer seeking the sea? A quiet collector with a love for light? An exile returning to rethread the stories of their youth?

This house is not simply a listing. It's an invitation to own a piece of Irish cultural and architectural history, nestled in the hills of Killiney.