Asking price: €750,000
Agent: Youngs Auctioneers (01) 497 5581
The Full Irish is a glossy hardback tome by Sarah Lappin that encapsulates the notion that all was not bad about the Celtic Tiger era, at least in the realm of Irish architecture.
The book shows that between 1997 and 2007, Ireland experienced a dizzying explosion of truly revolutionary and dazzling one-off home designs which would catch the eye of an international audience.
The main living space at Zero David Road
The growing affluence of the mid to late ‘90s marked the first time that young Irish architectural graduates didn’t have to head abroad to get experience and work.
Classmates from college banded together to form new practices. They began with contemporary extensions that combined swish style with function, and gradually gained commissions for virgin one-off homes, paid for by the newly enriched professionals and self-made business people of Ireland.
Often, the first step up was designing and building their own homes: as the embodiment of the longest hatched new ideas, the honing of practice and talent – and ultimately, the creation of the tangible bricks and mortar shop window, to show off to prospective clients what a practice could do.
For the first time, designing and project managing one-off homes (and wholly contemporary ones at that), became a sustainable and even profitable option in Ireland.
The Full Irish, subtitled New Architecture In Ireland, was published in 2009 just as the economy crashed along with the commissions. But for a sparkling decade, Ireland witnessed the creation of some of the world’s most innovative one-off homes.
Architect Allister Coyne
The book includes homes and other buildings from firms like Boyd Cody, Bucholz McEvoy, Dominic Stevens, Grafton Architects, Heneghan Peng, O’Donnell + Tuomey and ODOS.
Monaghan-born Architect Allister Coyne was among the generation who stepped out of college into this belle epoque for contemporary home designers. Like many of the younger architect firms of the decade, one of his first designs was for a residence for himself and his partner (now his wife) Jane, a school teacher who also has a taste for design.
A view of the living area at Zero David Road
The result was Zero David Road in Drumcondra, Dublin 9. Conceived and started in 2003 when his practice Ailtireacht (architecture in English) was also brand new. It’s a contemporary three bedroom of 980 sq ft constructed in a side garden corner site that was part of the garden of a period house.
“We knew at the time that we wanted to find a site on which to design and build our own home. We bid on the site and bought it, and it already came with a permission on it, albeit smaller and different to the one that we envisaged.
“Our main concern was the site was hard against the street. To use it properly, the resulting home would see us cheek by jowl with it, and the most important thing was to ensure that the resulting home fit with the visual integrity of the area, but that it also that it would be defensive to the street to give us the privacy we needed,” he adds.
The plywood and iroko kitchen at Zero David Road
“The first challenge was to open up the site and excavate it because the soil level was actually somewhat higher than the street alongside. So we excavated down.
“I opted for a brick with hydraulic lime render so that it would fit in with the other homes in the area. To the street we’d have a brick wall with slot windows at a high level to take in the eastern sunlight. But inside, the house would wrap around an enclosed courtyard garden with big glazed access from many points in the house. We opted for iroko teak for the framing because it’s so much more flexible than aluminium. You can do so much more with it. We employed a joiner from Latvia to make them up.”
The bathroom at Zero David Road
The house still looks current two decades on. It’s entered near the corner from the street into a little channel which leads to the front door. Once inside, you pass the bathroom on the left and move into the main kitchen, dining and living area.
The open-plan space continues around the stairwell, the channel for which is located in front of the main entrance door. To the right when you enter, you’re into a long narrow hall lit from above, which takes you to the third bedroom, located on the ground floor.
The exterior of Zero David Road
“We decided to bring the brick inside for continuation and we used a white resin on the floor.” The bespoke kitchen is an intriguing mix of both the cheap and the expensive, designed using a mix of plywood and iroko, giving it a multi-toned effect. The kitchen units have been copper-covered, and the copper-covered table comes with the house.”
As you come up the stairs, a magnificent view across the Dublin skyline opens up
The lower kitchen units are playfully on castors, allowing them to be rolled out and deployed elsewhere if required.
The stairs goes up to the first floor. “We put a copper box enclosure on the top of the ground floor with this huge picture window. As you come up the stairs, a magnificent view across the Dublin skyline opens up, which includes the Poolbeg chimney stacks.” Up on this floor is bedroom one, with its en suite bathroom, and bedroom two. Downstairs and outside is the enclosed courtyard garden.
Architect Allister Coyne
Measuring a decent 540 sq ft, it has a privacy that means you could be anywhere with a planting of shrubs and copper toned maples. There’s a timber deck which contacts with a green painted resin floor. It’s here that Jane likes to deploy her collection of cheeky garden statuary, including a rude gnome and a duo of bright pink Koonsian balloon dogs.
The sun moves through the house 270 degrees from the slot windows in the east in the morning through to the south-facing side at the back of the kitchen in the evening. “It means the house changes through the day as the sun moves over it,” says Coyne. Since moving in the couple got married and now have three children.
“We’re selling after 23 years because they’re all in school on the southside. We’re now looking for a site south of the river to do it all again,” says Coyne.”
Young Auctioneers seeks €750,000 for Zero David Road.