A Blackrock home transformed: ‘It was dark, poky and stinky. Instead of moving, I thought, why not fix it’

Embarking on a complete renovation of your home is not a project for the faint-hearted, but it would take more than that to faze Twink Hickey. The recently widowed Dubliner took on the project with gusto, and decamped to a wooden cabin in her garden for eight months during the build. She now looks back on it all as “a really great experience”.

She had lived in the house, a stone’s throw from Blackrock’s seafront, for almost 30 years but never really liked it. “It was freezing in the winter. It was dark and poky, and it was stinky like a pub because we both smoked like trains,” she says.

She met her husband, musician and artist Alastair Mathews, when they were both in Newtown boarding school in Waterford decades earlier, but they went their separate ways. Alastair bought the three-bedroom house in the 1980s and, after they reconnected in the 1990s, she moved in with him, along with her twin boys who were in their late teens.

After Alastair died in 2021, she began to consider her future. Her sons live abroad, and she found the house to be a really depressing place. “I thought about moving but it’s a great area and the sea is right there. So I thought I would fix it instead.”

A friend recommended Brookmont Construction, who will be familiar to fans of Dermot Bannon’s Room to Improve show on RTÉ, and they recommended Jim Lawler of MeltedSnow Architects. “Jim asked me to do a list of all the things I wanted and, looking back, I got it all,” she says.

Unlike many home renovation projects, she was not looking for more space. “I wanted to open the house up, have an open-plan downstairs and bring in more light.” And with an eye to the future, she asked that her bedroom be downstairs in case mobility ever became an issue. She is an artist and craftmaker, so her wish list also contained a downstairs sewing room.

“Who knows when I’ll end up being too wobbly to go up and down so I wanted to have everything downstairs and then I could have people to stay upstairs.”

The work started last September, signalling her move into the cabin in the garden. “There was only cold running water and no loo or shower, so it was interesting, but the important thing is that I didn’t have to pay rent,” she recalls.

She returned to her home eight months later and says it felt like a new house. “It was totally gutted, ceilings, floors and walls, and rebuilt,” she says. She gained a fourth bedroom, and an en suite bathroom downstairs.

Visitors to the original house were greeted with a poorly-designed porch, a confusion of doors and a long narrow hallway. Now they walk into a bright, airy and inviting home.

She says the energy rating in the old house was off the scale, and not in a good way. “The bills were colossal. Now it’s A-rated. I wanted it to be as close to an eco-house as I could get it. I got a heat pump, and now I have lovely hot water and underfloor heating and it’s always 21 degrees all year round. The grandkids throw their shoes off as soon as they come in the doors,” she says.

“It’s really toasty and cosy now. We’ve done tonnes of insulation and it’s triple-glazed, so the heat stays inside.”

The spacious kitchen, dining and living area is filled with light and looks on to a mature garden that stretches over more than half an acre and includes a generous patio. “Perfect for looking up at the stars at night,” she says.

Back in the bespoke kitchen, the wooden sink was made from a fallen tree by a family friend from Wales, tree surgeon and carpenter Mike Kemp. Furniture designer Patrick McKenna of Wabi Sabi built her kitchen and came up with the plan for a copper sink, to complement the wooden feature. “The sink is easy to maintain, no different to an ordinary sink,” she says. A paste of lemon and salt will remove tarnish and bring back the shine.

“The copper does its own thing, which I like. I didn’t want a perfect clinical kitchen and I do think this looks like it has been here a while,” she says. Adding to that feeling is the long oak table that was made by her father about 50 years ago. He was the artist and printmaker Patrick Hickey, who founded the Graphic Studio in Dublin. He was also the person responsible for her affectionate nickname, Twink, which replaced her birth name Mafalda almost as soon as she was named.

Twink Hickey: 'The bills were colossal. Now it’s A-rated. I wanted it to be as close to an eco-house as I could get it.' Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

Her mother Bizzy also studied art and when you enter the sewing room, it’s clear that she inherited her parents’ artistic flair. The bright and spacious room is a sanctuary for sewing and crafting enthusiasts. A quilting machine sits in one corner with an almost-finished hand-sewn quilt. Rows of colourful embroidered chickens on a felt background are on display on the worktable and she is working on a rope bowl on another machine. “I am waiting on shelves for my books and the room it’s almost finished,” she says. “I expect to be spending a lot of time here in the winter.”

Her recent fraught experience trying to source the bookshelves left her feeling very relieved that she had handed over the building project to other people. “Between the architect and the builders, I didn’t have to do anything. They worked so well together. I’m good at delegating. If I had to get all those people myself, I couldn’t handle it,” she says. “It’s more expensive to do it this way but it was worth it for me.”

And she says there’s no reason why someone of her age (64) shouldn’t take on a project like this, as long as they get the right people. “It was a really great experience. There were no nasty surprises, no dry rot or rooves falling in. I got lucky every step of the way,” she says. “And now I love the house.”