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.

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.