Your home… with living:room

As part of the Dublin Open House event in October, I visited TAKA Architects ‘House 1 | House 2′ in Donnybrook, Dublin – a project combining the refurbishment of a Georgian townhouse for the parents of architect and TAKA director, Alice Casey, with the construction of a new modern mews house at the rear to meet the needs of her sister and family.

As both houses were to be occupied by different generations of one family, the project offered a unique opportunity to make visual and physical connections linking the design of each property and to explore both a shared language in the use of materials – brick, concrete & timber – and the emotional context of a shared history.

5 Ideas to take from TAKA’s House 1 | House 2 (after pics):

5 Ideas to take from TAKA’s House 1 | House 2:

Brick Doesn’t Have to be Boring

Dublin has a rich tapestry of residential brick buildings primarily from the Georgian and Victorian periods, but its use in modern housing as a whole has been less than inspiring. Here, the mews house uses brick as a reference to the main house but in a playful way also shows how construction methods have changed in the intervening centuries. The sculptural ‘extruded’ brickwork to the front and the ‘perforated’ facade to the rear are polar opposites – positive and negative – but sandwiched together, they would form the standard ‘stock bond’ pattern of the brickwork on the original house. Innovation in building often involves an unknown quantity, something untried – a scary concept for home building and renovation. Here, it is the use of a familiar material in an unexpected way that is innovative – reminding us that even humble or everyday building materials have the potential to surprise and scooping the ‘Best International Project’ prize for TAKA at the BDA Brick Awards 2009 in the UK, in the process.

Sustainable Use of Land

We hear the word ‘sustainability’ bandied about a lot these days – to me it’s about using resources in the best way to ensure we can carry on using them for as long as possible. In urban environments, one of the scarcest, most valuable resources is land. Building a second house on an existing plot not only makes good use of available land but also of other existing resources like schools, public transport and services like water and drainage. Increasing ‘density’ – the number of households within a given area – guarantees continued local authority investment in these services and, therefore, their long-term sustainability.

Memory

The creation of these new homes was also a time of sadness as it meant saying goodbye to a long-term family home nearby – a place full of memories of their shared lives together. Both houses contain markers – reminders or experiences to tie back to the earlier life.  Alice and her siblings have memories of the staircase in the old house being like a room, where they played as children. The wide wooden staircase in the mews house echoes this, with built in seats on the lower steps, like the an amphitheatre, and opens onto a generous landing on the first floor. Making these spaces larger than necessary creates the opportunity for other activities to take place there  – for the next generation to discover the house in new ways and create their own memories. We often think of a home in terms of size – number of rooms or activities – but the idea of creating spaces that evoke memory takes ‘putting your own stamp’ on a home beyond mere style statements into more emotional and unique expressions of individuality.

Ritual

Down-sizing to a new home, the parents worried they would see less of the whole family and a large altar-like concrete dining table was created in a glazed extension to the original house to bring everyone together around the ritual of eating. The solidity of the table gives a sense of being grounded in a time of change and upheaval. So many rituals form part of our everyday lives – bathing, cooking, eating, sleeping. As with the idea of memory, recognising the rituals that are important to us is another way of approaching how we design our spaces to reflect our own individual needs.

The ‘Hearth’ of the Home

Both houses play up the domestic rituals of the hearth and cooking. In the mews, the staircase wraps around the exposed brick chimney of the fireplace as it rises up through the house, forming a central core to the home; the activity of cooking is separated from the kitchen and brought into the centre of the living space forming a focal point to the room. A nice touch is the specially designed ceramic tiles on the wall beside the concrete table in the main house – the same tiles are used in the open fire hearths of both houses. This idea could easily be adapted to suit a house extension project – taking a detail or feature from the original house and incorporating it in the new space, creating subtle links between old and new.

If you found this article of interest, you may also like:

Dublin Open House: A-Rated House by FKL Architects (and 5 Ideas to Steal…)

It’s Not About Looks – Good Design Works

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Do you have any any pet peeves about housing or home design? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to see featured.