This house is located on a family farm in the historic Slyguff landscape in Co. Carlow. The client’s family has been curators of this landscape for generations and continues to play an important role in the conservation of its natural, cultural and archaeological character. This home enables the younger generation to continue this tradition.

Context is very important. Cultural artefacts, with origins in farming, archaeology, neo-classicism, Victorian industry and infrastructure, contribute significantly to the spatial character of this landscape. This house seeks to integrate into this landscape character by emphasizing new relationships with these artefacts.

La entrada Sliguff House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Hollybrook Road is in a suburb of Dublin. The project involved refurbishing the ground floor return of a Victorian house and making an extension that would incorporate a kitchen and dining area for a young family that would reflect their life and their aspiration toward making something beautiful.

The project from the outset had a clear intent to make a series of distinct sequential interior spaces from the front door to the rear garden that knitted the old and new parts of the house together. The pantry area drops from the main house in 6 generous limestone steps . This room containing a hidden WC and utility area beneath the existing return and the new extension are built in reinforced concrete and wrapped in external insulation.

The concrete work forms the basis of the project providing a material that can be rough in places, smooth and more refined in others, and allows a degree of form making / shaping. Casting the extension as a singular form, the down-stand beams that hold the return overhead and the roof of the extension could depart from being mere structure. They are brought back within the main cruciform space of the extension to buffer the threshold between inside and outside. Wrapping the building in external insulation allows the concrete form to be unbroken internally. The making of the interior spaces took precedence over what the building might look like as an object externally.

La entrada Hollybrook Road se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

This project arose in lockdown, to make a space for a novelist to write in isolation in their garden. The site, behind an existing terrace of houses, was inaccessible to builders, so we designed the room to be constructed off-site and craned into position.

This contingency governed the design and it became an exercise in éspace minimum – its weight had to work with the capacity of the crane. The weight limit also allowed us to dispense with conventional foundations in favour of augured ground anchors. The shape, too, was informed by the offsite approach. The room’s structure is an exoskeleton with raised corners linked to lifting eyes. Within, we found space for a rich internal world, lined in red-stained beech and mirror. It provides a desk to work from, and a daybed for rest.

La entrada The Writing Room se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

St Mary’s Hall, formerly St Mary’s Church, High Street, Kilkenny was founded in the thirteenth century as the parish church of the City. In use as a Parish and Masonic Hall since the mid-20th century, it was purchased by Kilkenny Borough Council in 2010 with assistance from Kilkenny County Council and the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government.

The building is a cruciform 13th century stone structure with a later tower at its Western end; it sits in a substantial walled graveyard to the rear of High Street. The graveyard has recently been opened as a garden to the public; it contains many important tombs and monuments from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

La entrada Medieval Mile Museum se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The site for this house contained a ruined farmhouse and barns that had been in the family since the early 1800’s.  Its layout was typical of the vernacular farmhouse type with a series of simple pitched roof volumes arranged around several yards that provide shelter from the coastal weather.  These buildings and yards accumulate incrementally over generations with new structures added to accommodate new uses.

The initial client brief was to renovate the existing buildings – but we enjoyed the buildings as ruins.  In their cob and stone walls, in the broken windows and weathered shutters, in the cast iron stove and stable hitches, in the egg boxes and broken books we could see the lives of those who had lived here before and could feel the slow passage of time.  To renovate would be to erase the mysterious joy of the ruin.  So we decided to add to the complex of buildings the way it had always happened in the past, with the addition of a single simple building.  In the process we created a series of outdoor garden rooms within and between the existing buildings.

La entrada Baltrasna House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.