Sinéad O’Connor’s house in Bray was called Montebello, and she made no attempt to keep it quiet. It is an 1860s double-fronted Victorian facing the seafront promenade in County Wicklow, and during the fifteen years she lived there she added murals, stained glass and brightly painted quoin stones along the corners of the front elevation. It was, unmistakably, hers.
She bought it in 2007 for €1.7 million and sold it in November 2021 for €1.04 million, a loss of around €660,000. She died in London in July 2023. When her funeral procession made its way through Bray the following month, it passed the house, and the crowds lined the road outside a property she had not owned for nearly two years. This guide covers Montebello, its price history, and what has happened to it since.
The house’s timeline
| Date | Event | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | O’Connor buys the seafront house | €1.7 million |
| 2007 to 2021 | Lives there for about fifteen years | — |
| November 2021 | Sells | €1.04 million |
| July 2023 | Dies at her London home, aged 56 | — |
| August 2023 | Her funeral procession passes the house | — |
| July 2025 | The house sells again | €1.295 million |
Who was Sinéad O’Connor?
Sinéad O’Connor was an Irish singer and songwriter, born in Dublin in 1966. Her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, and its version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” made her one of the most recognisable artists in the world in 1990. She spent the following three decades making music on her own terms and speaking publicly on subjects that repeatedly put her at odds with the industry and with the Catholic Church.
She converted to Islam in 2018 and took the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat, while continuing to record under the name by which she was known. She died on 26 July 2023, aged 56, at her home in London. A coroner ruled in January 2024 that she had died of natural causes.
Montebello
The house dates to the 1860s and sits directly on Bray’s seafront, facing the promenade. It is double-fronted, runs about 3,713 square feet, and has six bedrooms and three bathrooms, which makes it more than three times the size of an average Irish family home.
Bray is a Victorian seaside town about twenty kilometres south of Dublin, at the northern end of County Wicklow, and its promenade terraces were built for exactly this kind of house. Buying one is buying a piece of a specific Irish nineteenth-century idea about the sea.
What she did inside and out was not conventional restoration. Reporting on the house has consistently noted that she wanted its original Victorian features kept, and that she added her own layer on top: murals, stained glass, and the painted quoin stones on the corners of the front of the building, which are visible from the promenade and which made the house locally recognisable long before any of the events that followed.
The sale in 2021, and the loss
She bought in 2007 for €1.7 million, which was close to the peak of the Irish property boom. The crash that followed in 2008 was among the most severe in Europe, and Irish house prices did not return to 2007 levels for well over a decade in most of the country.
She sold in November 2021 for €1.04 million. That is a shortfall of roughly €660,000, or about 39 per cent, over fourteen years, before costs.
It is worth being clear that this reflects the timing of the purchase rather than anything about the house or its owner. Anyone who bought Irish property in 2007 and sold in 2021 faced a similar arithmetic. The distinctive, highly personal decoration will not have widened the buyer pool either, which is a pattern that recurs throughout this site.
The funeral, and what the house came to mean
O’Connor died in London in July 2023. Her funeral was held the following month, and her cortege travelled through Bray, passing the seafront house, with fans lining the route to say goodbye.
There is something worth noting in that. She had sold Montebello nearly two years earlier and had no legal connection to it. It was still, for the town and for the people who came, her house. The public meaning of a home and its ownership are different things, and they can diverge completely.
The same is true of the property covered in the guide to Nina Simone’s birthplace, a building that mattered enormously despite being small, modest and long out of the family’s hands.
What happened to the house
Because O’Connor died in 2023, the question of where she lives does not apply. What became of Montebello is the relevant one.
The owners who bought it from her in 2021 put it back on the market in December 2024, through the agents HJ Byrne, with a guide price of €1.295 million. It went sale agreed in March 2025 and the sale closed on 16 July 2025, meeting the guide price, as reported by The Irish Times.
That is a gain of about €255,000 for the intervening owners across roughly three and a half years, a period in which Irish prices rose. It also means the house has now been through two full transactions since she left it, and is a private family home belonging to people with no connection to her.
Her London home, where she died, has not been publicly identified, and this article does not attempt to. Estates of well-known musicians frequently leave one property carrying all of the public attention while the rest stays private, as the account of Joan Rivers’s apartment also shows.
Sources
- The Irish Times on the 2025 sale at €1.295 million, the 2007 purchase at €1.7 million and the November 2021 sale at €1.04 million.
- Limerick Live on the house’s size, its Victorian features, and the murals, stained glass and painted quoin stones she added.
- NPR on the coroner’s ruling in January 2024.
- Fox News on the August 2023 funeral procession through Bray.
