They really do use their imagination when decorating the exterior of this restaurant. Every time I pass by it is different.
Rathmines is an inner suburb on the southside of Dublin, about 3 kilometres south of the city centre. It effectively begins at the south side of the Grand Canal and stretches along the Rathmines Road as far as Rathgar to the south, Ranelagh to the east and Harold’s Cross to the west. It is situated in the city’s Dublin 6 postal district.
Rathmines has thriving commercial and civil activity and is well known across Ireland as part of a traditional “flatland” – providing rented accommodation to newly arrived junior civil servants and third level students coming from outside the city since the 1930s. In more recent times, Rathmines has diversified its housing stock and many houses have been gentrified by the wealthier beneficiaries of Ireland’s economic boom of the 1990s. Rathmines, nonetheless, is often said to have a cosmopolitan air, and has a diverse international population and has always been home to groups of new immigrant communities and indigenous ethnic minorities.
Mount Pleasant Square is a Georgian garden square on the border of Rathmines and Ranelagh. It is about twenty five minute walk from Grafton Street.
Completed in 1834, the square is widely celebrated for its elegance and quiet charm. In her article in The Georgian Squares of Dublin, Susan Roundtree writes: “It has justifiably been described as one of the most beautiful early 19th-century squares in Dublin.” In the 24 March 1978 edition of In Dublin magazine, Gordon Lynch wrote, “The recently face-lifted Mount Pleasant Square, which is protected by a preservation order, is the only curved square in Dublin, if such a thing is possible.”
There are 56 terraced houses on three sides of a central open space, now housing a tennis club and a small public park. The north and south sides are crescents rather than typical borders of a square. About half of the houses are occupied by young families, while several remain in apartments. Homes on the west side have south-west facing back gardens, there is a Victorian Era post-box on the south-west corner of the square.
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