The whole country is extending, it seems, and traditional façades can hide surprisingly modern extensions. Emma Cullinan seeks out the rear of the year.
Ireland's Georgian cities present a united front, with uniform terraces and squares forming elegant compositions that have brought them world-wide fame. But what lies beneath? Anyone who has been house hunting will have seen some of the horrors to the rear, especially those extensions that were built when no planning permission was required. Gradually, many of these have been pulled down because, quite frankly, a lot of them are unfit for human habitation.
Yet the rears of Georgian and Victorian buildings weren't always uniform anyway. As architect Brian O'Donoghue says: "While 18th-century squares in Dublin would have uniform facades, the rears would be built by individual developers and owners, resulting in idiosyncrasies. This is consistent with Georgian trends: the Royal Crescent in Bath has a uniform front, but if you stand behind this you'll see that all the sites were developed individually."
In more recent times, extensions have been added to the rears of Irish houses, often in a vain attempt to remain in keeping with the original structure. But as far back as 1965 the Venice Charter stated that new additions to old buildings should be clearly identifiable: pastiche (trying to copy what has gone before) was a no-no among forward-thinking architects.
But, as architect Paul Quilligan says: "It has taken 40 years for the message to get through to some people, although many architects have been trying to spread the word for some time." Now an increasing number of houses in Ireland have the most amazing contemporary extensions added to the rear, creating a situation in which Victorian and Georgian terraces and squares look very different to their 21st-century behinds.
The key factor about the projects featured here is that the extensions have actually improved the overall space of the houses. A poorly designed extension can cut out light from the existing rooms, create unusable, dead spaces in the garden and cut valuable space from existing rooms to create access corridors. The irony in these cases is that, although the actual amount of space has been increased, the house can feel smaller. As architect Will Dimond points out, it is difficult to add rear extensions to houses with two-room plans: "There's a whole history of little toilets stuck on the back of Georgian houses."
GEORGIAN TERRACE
In the refurbishment of this Dublin house, Boyd Cody Architects stayed true to the best aspects of the existing building, while improving the darker spaces and adding on a contemporary, but sympathetic extension. Typically, this late-Georgian terraced house has rooms of magnificent proportions, which the architects left intact, instead concentrating their efforts on the previous servants' quarters in the basement and return. The new work was differentiated from the existing structure through the use of a neat palette of materials, such as black walnut and marble floor finishes.
The new kitchen/dining area shoots out from the existing return into the garden; emerging from the former dark area into bright, natural light. This room, with its large glass wall, has a close relationship with the garden or, even, gardens, as it has views across the neighbours' green spaces. A sliding screen enables users of the extension to connect with the outdoor space, even if they choose to remain undercover. Should they venture out, the garden is reached by granite steps, rescued from elsewhere on site.
Here, a black reflecting pool creates a counterpoint to the bright kitchen/dining room. This pool runs along a Dublin limestone wall, linking the upper garden with the lower granite terrace.
Above the dining room is a new shower room, the roof light of which sends natural light bouncing off the heavily-veined white marble floor and wet area. This extension uses the same colour render as the existing house, but its design makes it clearly of its time.
CANTILEVERED BATHROOM
When architects Susan and Will Dimond began major renovations to their Dublin 8 home, they decided to move the bathroom from the first-floor landing, up a floor, between the second and third floors. This made sense for a couple of reasons - its new position placed it nearer to bedrooms and it also allowed more light into the ground-floor hallway. In the 1950s, the bathroom had been added to the 1820s building, blocking out light that used to reach the hallway through a large window at the back.
The new bathroom has been cantilevered off the rear of the house, and sits on two steel beams for support. "We cantilevered the bathroom to avoid the usual problem associated with carving bathrooms out of homes with two-room floor plans," says Will, of Donaghy and Dimond Architects. "We didn't want the new return to run the whole way up the building because this would cut light from the hallway and the upper floor." The timber-framed bathroom is lined internally with plywood, while the exterior is in rough-hewn larch, to create the feeling of a wooden box.
The untreated exterior will eventually weather and relate to the time-bleached louvred shutters on the bell tower of a nearby church, which are too far out of reach to be maintained.
On the couple's bathroom roof, alpine plants will help with some of the maintenance. Sedums have been planted on top of a fleece that will help absorb water, which might otherwise overwhelm the gutters. The plants can soak up the excess but, being used to harsh high-altitude conditions, they will also put up with a lack of water during dry spells.
VICTORIAN VILLA
It's surprising how even quite large houses can have awkward spaces and bad circulation that makes them feel smaller than they really are. When this villa-style, box-shaped house came up for sale in Sandymount, Dublin, many viewers were put off by its rooms, stacked on top of each other and straddling a large hall and stairwell. The makers of the film About Adam used it for their shoot and then the current owners saw it, and consulted architect Paul Quilligan about what could be done with the space. As Paul points out, times have changed. This house would be perfectly suited to having servants, who could be tucked away downstairs, and then come up and knock on the doors to serve tea. The split granite steps up to the front door are impressive, but are impractical for visitors and guest greeters - with everyone facing a trek to the elevated front door.
The current owners have four children, so this building needed to be transformed into a family home. The key changes were the removal of a back room, which was replaced by an impressive, glassy, light-filled extension, which feels warm due to the generous wooden window frames and timber flooring. Two steel columns on the exterior are Quilligan's ode to architect Mies van der Rohe.
The architect has added another internal staircase to one side of the house, which begins by the new main door. "It's an easier, less formal way for people to get into the house," says Paul. This new side door means visitors don't have to be ushered in through a dark back door, or the grand front door. The kitchen and dining area is on the first floor, facing south and west, while downstairs is the children's room which they can access through the new main door.
The spaces work as was intended by both the client and architect. Children returning from school dump their bags in the new curved, timber-clad hallway and disappear into the ground floor room in the extension. This has many links into the garden, which wraps around it, through wooden windows, French doors and another door. As the owner quips, the windows are made from wood and the walls are glass. The link with the garden is crucial, with a balcony and steps running down from the upstairs room.
Now the house is used to its optimum, with easy access between spaces, including a couple of cosy rooms, just off the main spaces, to hide away in.
Rather than open-plan, this design has used en-suite planning. There's a general open-plan feel, with small adjacent spaces in which people can park themselves. This way family members are near each other, and aware of each other, without all being holed up together.