After three decades of international work, architect Patrick Mellett's hallmark is readily observable on a flagship Dublin shop, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
Irish architect Patrick Mellett left for Paris two weeks after he graduated from Bolton Street in Dublin in 1980. There were few jobs in Ireland then. Many of his generation emigrated to Britain or the US, but Mellett was drawn to the good life he'd known in France as an exchange student.
Two Italian architects encouraged Mellett's interest in innovative design. His first job in Paris was helping Gae Aulenti with the Orsay impressionist museum. On her suggestion, Mellett then went to work with Ettore Sottsass in Milan from 1983 until 1986.
Sottsass died on December 30th, 2007, aged 90. "He was incredibly rigorous about every act of every day, how he dressed, how he used time and space," Mellett says. "He had a huge effect on my creative life. He was the spiritual father of my attitude . . ."
The first assignment Sottsass gave Mellett was to design cutlery for the Italian kitchenware manufacturer Alessi. "We didn't work with computers then," says Mellett. "We worked with pencils and rolls of tracing paper. Each drawing was two metres high. That was how we controlled the form and visual weight of the object. We went through this process before we started making prototypes.
"It opened my eyes about Italian design, which is the total approach to the built environment," Mellett continues. "We designed everything from the spoon to the city, because we also did urban planning - commercial architecture, residential architecture, theatre sets . . ."
Mellett returned to Paris to set up his own firm in 1987. In 1996, he became the architect for the Tour de France. "I was asked to give it a look for the turn of the century," he says. "I thought of it as a circus coming to a village square. Trucks travel across the countryside. On arrival, they're transformed into design pieces: the start and finishing lines, the winners' stand, the VIP lounge."
On the wall of his Paris office hangs a framed letter from Sir Terence Conran, in which the man Mellett calls "the guru of 20th-century design" praises the Dublin Habitat shop, which Mellett designed with the architect Safia Baroudi, one of his team of eight. Conran called the shop, with entrances on College Green and Suffolk Street "quite the grandest and best I've ever seen".
Mellett's office has conceived 15 turn-key projects for Habitat since 2005, 11 of which have been built - in Ireland, France, Spain, Britain and Germany. "We are using architecture to reinforce the Habitat brand," Mellett explains. His Habitat shops in the Lakeside shopping centre outside London and in Leeds won the prize for best commercial architecture in Britain in 2006.
Mellett felt particularly honoured to design the Habitat store in Dublin, "my native capital city". The challenge was to unite a bank on College Green, founded by Daniel O'Connell in the late 19th century, with an adjacent 1960s concrete building in Suffolk Street. "The two basic problems were inserting an architectural project in a historic, classified building, and making two languages, two architectural types work together," he says.
The Suffolk Street building was higher than the College Green building, so Mellett built a great staircase between the two. "Having different levels created a sense of drama and reinforced the architectural experience," he says.
The College Green entrance is a glass facade with columns. "We created a gazebo entrance to the lobby, which is a celebration of the gardens of Ireland," says Mellett. The cylindrical gazebo, moulded in plaster, was pre-fabricated in Paris, moved in 20 pieces and assembled in Dublin. "We used French craftsmen to build it. Irish carpenters proposed building it in wood at twice the cost."
Other recent Mellett projects include the renovation of the Irish Embassy in Paris, with Mark McSwiney, the architect for the Department of Foreign Affairs; and the new Google headquarters near the Paris Opera, with Google's architects.
Mellett is opening offices in Doonbeg, Co Clare, and Berlin this year. He is particularly enthusiastic about an apartment complex of 18 to 20 units on the coast at Malahide, still in the planning stage. Its spatial sequences have been influenced by a museum he designed in Abu Dhabi. "It won't be Islamic, but it's about the interaction of public, semi-private and private spaces and their relation to nature."
Every apartment in the Malahide complex will have a view of the sea, and will also look on to a giant cylindrical courtyard garden with a lily pond and Lebanese cedar tree.
"It will be modern. It's quite conceptual," he says. "It's composed of two main bodies of buildings. The one nearest the sea is inspired by the forms of naval architecture, by rounded boat shapes. The second part is a sold block, sculpted in the centre, with a courtyard that imposes a silence, like a cloister. We're playing with light bordeaux-coloured sandstone and white ceramic for the facade, with bamboo and metal and glass for the skin of the courtyard."
After nearly three decades as an architect, Mellett is pleased that he has no immediately recognisable style. "I interpret what clients want. I am like a geologist, a historian, a sociologist," he says. "I try to discover the soul of a place, so every project has been completely different. I don't stylise. I'm not selling a product or a brand. Our architecture is developed from the emotional make-up of our clients, and the history of the place. I'm delighted to stay in the shadows."
