Pastry chef’s home is a treat for the eyes with open plan kitchen and ‘barbecue dad’s dream garden’

Asking price: €595,000

Agent: Sherry Fitzgerald (01) 414 0004

​Xavier Torne's Clondalkin home is quite the confection. For the Barcelona-born pastry chef, turning a 1970s detached house in Dublin 22 into an eat-it-with-your-eyes specimen served as proof that some skills are truly transferable.

Before he moved to Dublin, Torne worked at Adare Manor in Co Limerick, managing a team of 24 other pastry chefs, whose task it was to make the desserts, petits fours, breads and chocolates for the exclusive resort, where dinner plus a wine pairing from The Oak Room restaurant's signature menu costs €260 per head..

Torne says he feels very lucky to have worked in a setting with such generous resources. "I think the owners, the McManus family, were very good in terms of trying to bring the best," he says. "They made a huge investment to make it a world-class hotel. It is a very well-supported, managed brand, and you have the staff members you actually need in order to deliver, compared to a lot of other places."

While he worked at the manor, he lived in Limerick city, but moved to Clondalkin when a change in career direction saw him take a desk job with Musgrave Group in Dublin. There, Torne oversees the wholesale of component products for pastry and chocolate confectionery.

Torne had no pre-existing connection to the area. "I was not really specific in location, I was looking for somewhere close to work, to a certain extent. Somewhere that wouldn't be the city centre, where you might not get the best value for money.

"I kind of stumbled across Clondalkin and asked a couple of colleagues about it because I heard a lot of things, some negative. But they were like, 'No, it's a really nice area, it depends on which part you live in but the majority of it is great.' Monastery Rise and all the streets around have turned out to be really great."

Number 46 has three bedrooms and about 1,430sq ft of living accommodation. It has a sitting room and a living/dining room, as well as a guest bathroom on the ground floor, while upstairs there are three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

"There was a good bit of renovation to be done, internally and externally," says Torne. "The major things were kind of done, but they needed upgrading and whatnot. That's where the skills of being a pastry chef came in. You have a sense of space, colour coordination and so on, so I would have done 70 or 80pc of the work myself.

"I'm not a tradesman but I have experience of refurbishing because I had a house in Limerick before and I refurbished that top to bottom as well, and I did everything myself. So I learned the tricks.

"Towards the high end on pastry, you need to learn colour coordination and texture within your desserts. You can kind of apply that in real life. And material design is not that far off. At the end of the day, it's about texture, colours, organisation, the spatial awareness of where to put things — I used all of that knowledge, plus loads of scrolling through Instagram for inspiration."

One of Torne's proudest efforts is a sort of lattice wainscotted timber wall in the living room. "That was very easy," he says. "Planks of wood, which you can get in B&Q or Woodies or any kind of a wholesaler. You kind of draw a map on the wall with a pencil. Then you just start cutting those planks and stick them or, in this case, nail them on because my walls are not exactly even, the house having been built in 1978."

Torne also created a panelled feature wall at one end of the living/dining area, to demarcate the living spaces. The kitchen, meanwhile, has a large island with an Italian white quartz top and Kube storage units. Torne says despite being a professional, he still loves to cook at home when he has the time.

"I wanted a lot of open space, a nice big island," he says. "Where I can actually, you know, cook at home and entertain friends and colleagues. So yeah, the passion is still there and I try to bring it every now and again on the weekend."

Out the back, Torne has created a sunken garden with an open-air fireplace that will appeal to 'barbecue-dads' the country over. "I wanted something very low maintenance. I can enjoy the odd sunny day in Ireland and make the most of it outside, rather than being busy maintaining a lawn and breaking a sweat."

Even when the sun doesn't shine, Torne's home has the renewable energy infrastructure to take full advantage of available light with an 8.7kW solar panel and a 10kW battery, which means zero electricity bills and roughly €600 cash back annually. In a separate plant room to the side is a heat pump-compatible Joule water heater.

His future plans include looking for somewhere else to put his personal touch, and possibly seeking new professional horizons too. "At some point, I would like to own my own thing. What that thing is, I don't quite know yet and whether it will materialise or not, we will see. But I love what I do at the minute, and there is plenty of room within the (Musgrave) group, so we'll see."

For now, selling his home would be the perfectly caramelised crust on a Catalan pudding for Torne.