House & Home Magazine
September/October 2004

‘Boxing Clever’

The owners of a 1930s suburban cottage wanted more and better quality family space. By thinking outside of the box they came up with the goods by extension.

The rear garden has a tranquil alfresco living character with a contemporary twist, a bike shed is glimpsed through the trees, while a side gate is a handy second access point.

Previous extensions such as the add-on porch went with the older character of the house, the extension to the side and back is a fast-forward move to a new century.

Whoever comes with a book of house extension selections, suggestions, guides, plans and advice will make a tidy sum. There’s hardly a house built in the country that its owners won’t, at some stage, want to extend. The problem is, so many extensions are predictable, boring squares or boxes, and don’t add anything other than a few square feet to the character of a house.

Pushing boundaries
Terence and Clare Corish had previously enlarged their village-like Goatstown cottage in South Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s. However, with son Luke, now aged six and half on the scene, they needed to push back the boundaries once more.

Previous alterations included a larger kitchen (1980s) to the back, the cottage-like front porch (early 1990s) and the attic conversion, with peaky twin dormers also discretely tucked into the rear.

Again in need of more space, they decided to add to the side and back, creating a bedroom for Luke and a new bathroom and main entrance in a deliberate box-like structure.

Credit for the funky design and detailing goes in equal amounts to Terence (who changed from an earlier career as an electrical engineer to architecture and who now in domestic commissions) and to his friend Gary Mongey of the award-winning firm Box Architecture.

Essentially, working in tandem, they eschewed the notion of grafting on yet another extension in cottage style, and instead opted for something contemporary, reflecting the times it was conceived and built in.

Box structure
The extension is basically a wooden box – built with a timber-frame and then clad in cedar – on low rising walls on a raft foundation and concrete slab, with unadourned window opes. Despite the apparent simplicity, which is a hallmark of Box Architecture’s practice, there is immense attention to detail and detailing, and the result is a Pandora’s Box, albeit of internal pleasant surprises.

“Gary is a very good friend, a fine architect and is a self-taught carpenter who really understands how important getting the details right is,” approves Terence. “We both have a good sensitivity for material and knowing what goes where. Gary is excellent at working out ways to detail and assemble them so that they ‘read’ properly.”

He credits Gary with details such as the way junctions between walls, floors and ceilings work, the sheeting detail, the slot window between the old house and the box at the front, and at the ‘disappearing’ sliding window at the end of the box. Also notable are the copper-clad roof, window and door choices, recesses instead of skirting boards, as well as the horizontal sheet of glass in the roof above Luke’s bed which adds an extra dimension to the lighting.

“People often talk about how important it is to get quantities of light into a house, but you don’t really want a white glare of light flooding a room. Every bit as important is the quality of light, and there’s a lovely quality of light here coming in through the garden and between the trees,” notes Terence. (Perhaps it is this aesthetic sensibility which informs his green credentials. He ran as a Green party candidate in this year’s local elections, and is closely related to the former Labour Party Corishes who trace a political pedigree to Terence’s grandfather in Wexford in the 1910s).

Multi-functional
What is currently Luke’s bedroom (with adjoining new bathroom) was designed to be a multi-functional as possible: you can imagine it as a granny flat, a teenager’s locked-away den, a private living or a study.

It opens directly on to a paved patio area – laid with old stone sets, and created by scooping out seven skip loads of earth and a low concrete wall which was substituted as a border to retain the rest of the sloping garden. This wall is built like a Baghdad war bunker, Terence observes, though it is painted in anything but camouflage shades. It is an eye-popping purple, very Diarmuid Gavin – but actually done before Gavin made such features a trademark.

Millennium Moves
Work on the extension started just in time for the Millennium, but unfortunately it wasn’t hassle free. In fact, the builder who had pared his estimates too narrowly went bust, which meant finishing this job by direct labour, fortunately at least with the input of two very accomplished carpenters who delivered a quality product to the end.

Although it started in 1999, there is still some finishing to be done. Clare and Terence want to put in a water feature outside Luke’s bedroom window, for example, while the so-1980s melamine kitchen units too are due for a change. At present, the kitchen’s contemporary feel comes from the dark charcoal-coloured Amtico flooring, and the tall painted MDF storage presses.

Putting in the extension gave the couple scope for a new entrance and circulation the way they use the house. The porch Terence put on so unobtrusively in 1992, for example, is now almost redundant except for front-door callers who don’t know the house, and as a result the living room right inside the porch is much more private.

“The living room is a great spot in winter. We are not too inclined to use it in summer when we live at the back of the house,” they say, appreciating the options and both actual and metaphorical doors the changes have opened up to them.

“It is a house of two eras, it pleases both camps, those who like the older houses and those who like contemporary architecture. I’m not a purist and could quite happily live in one or the other. A house should be true to itself and to its time,” Terence reasons.

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