The project began with a protected Edwardian house that overlooks a large south facing garden.  The character of this extension and new kitchen garden to the side of the existing house arises from a study of the informal and ancillary additions to formal houses of this period. These important adjacent spaces often facilitated everyday life in the form of kitchens, pantries, sheds, and kitchen gardens but were often hidden behind garden walls.

Our design draws from this rich, if haphazard, building culture to make an extension and garden space that allows the original house to continue to dominate the view from the garden while the new rooms disappear behind the new garden wall that connects to the existing granite walls surrounding the site. From the street, the addition continues the language of tall granite boundary walls that define the front and boundary walls throughout this neighbourhood in old south Dublin.  
Hidden behind the wall, the two new main rooms – a kitchen and a garden - adopt the warmth of the existing house’s red brick, making rooms that feel both contemporary and connected, indoors and outdoors. Two large mirrored square openings provide visual and physical links to the front garden. One opens to the courtyard, the other glazed to the kitchen.

Light, nature, and structure were the anchors of the design. The brick lined courtyard is heavily planted and connects directly to the internal life of the kitchen through a continuous series of opening glazed doors set under deep sheltered eaves. 
The courtyard brick runs seamlessly into the kitchen and coupled with the level access floor, allows the threshold between internal and external worlds 
to blur and nature and light to penetrate in. Spanning the roof between the existing masonry wall and a steel beam was achieved by an articulated internal timber roof structure of deep beams, stacked battens and diagonally articulated noggins.

Photography by Shantanu Starick