Outside of Dublin’s largely Georgian and Victorian era core lies a near continuous ring of suburban mid-20th century single family houses, densely packed as row houses or ‘semi-detached’ pairs.  These neighbourhoods are predominantly constructed very affordably in concrete block, cement plaster and roof tiles.  While most of these houses have quite limited exterior spaces, occasionally, by a happy accident of cul-de-sac geometries, a large angular garden might be found.  The clients acquired one such secret garden whose wedge shape meets the street at the width of a car while it widens to 23 metres at the rear. The project was to double the size of the small existing house while connecting to the unique site.

The resulting design of a long slender block divides the site to create two types of garden; a smaller, shady entrance space and a rear sunny garden containing a green, raised beds and a small orchard.  We designed a formal facade to address this landscape that emphasises the unusually wide site with windows aligned front and back connect the two gardens through the new large hall room. 

The house is constructed of the ordinary materials of the neighbourhood. The commonly found crisp plaster base and ‘pebbledash’ top is carried into the house where the clean lined surface of lower level plaster is countered by the mortar washed texture of the upper walls. The roof is supported by the seemingly endless exposed steel ridge bridging along small figural posts that stand down onto dividing cross walls. The last of these is a floating screen wall that conceals an east facing window made to trap morning light above the kitchen. 

Ultimately it is a project of layered oppositions, a linear structure in an amorphous site, a formal facade made of typical materials, plastic plaster surfaces vs expressive tectonic structure, trapped light on a dark foreground, and a steel beam that does not begin or end but lands along the way.

Completed 2023.

Photography by Johan Dehlin. 

Winner of an AAI Award 2023.