enter awards
Category Winner
2022
House in Sandycove
CATEGORY
Architectural Design: Residential
Structures & Spaces
CONTRIBUTORS
Windows: Carlson and Timeless Sash Windows
Concrete Floors: Uniqrete
Tiling: Design Emporium
Timber Floors: Hardwood Flooring Company
Stone Counters: Leinster Stone
Sanitary Ware: Bathhouse
Kitchen and Fitted Furniture: Woodale
Aisling McCoy (Photographer)
Design Challenge and Design Ideas
Existing house and a sustainable design approach.
This project involved the restoration and extension of an historic double fronted Regency style end of terrace house, ensuring its future and make a modern, energy efficient family home, appropriate to its context. Previous alterations and extensions since its original construction made for small, dark rooms and convoluted circulation. Typical of its age, the house had issues with damp and thermal performance while archaic plumbing and electrical systems required upgrading.
Works involved a deep retrofit of the existing house, substantially improving the energy rating of the whole house to an A3.
Maximising natural light and ventilation to all rooms in the house, while retaining as much garden space as possible for planting was key to the design.
How the brief was fulfilled
The addition of a modest single and two storey extension, set back from the existing house across two courtyards, is an adaptation which allows both the existing house to breathe, and family life to extend out in to a series of gently choreographed and characterful spaces, framing and leading to the garden beyond.
Setting the extension back from the original house and preserves the legibility of its form and allows the new extension to be distinct from the original architecture. The existing granite boundary wall is retained and incorporated into the side elevation and the new first floor is set back from this, making a subtle change to the street scape and providing additional privacy.
From the doorway of the existing house, a view through the new living spaces connects to the garden beyond. The new rooms are separated from the existing house by two new courtyards, through which a new glazed hall passes, maintaining light and views to the neighbouring property and ensuring that the existing rooms are light filled. Recessed timber lined pocket studies are tucked into the sides of the glazed hall.
A traditional palette of materials was used, with silica sand in the limewash applied to the regular module of brick creating a gentle texture and capturing the coastal light playfully. Along with lead capping and timber cladding the materials chosen were
intended to combine to form gentle and organic external elevations animated by natural texture and tone, sympathetic to its historic neighbours.
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From an architecture perspective they have achieved a lot of internal space whilst being sympathetic to the local area achieving a non exposing modern extension.
"JUDGES' THOUGHTS