Brick-A-Brack House

The client had grown up in Dublin's inner city and always nostalgically admired the red brick houses. We wanted to incorporate the red bricks into as a key design feature of the extension. The object was to have the indoors be a continuation of the outside and visa versa; with exposed brick walls carrying on from the kitchen to the garden, juxtaposed against a clean white minimal staircase, kitchen and tiled floor. One finds the wall folded right back into the interior to open a space for living space and a patio beyond. A single volume extends visually from the front door to the rear wall of the site where a variety of spatial conditions are overlaid, all differentiated by the degree of enclosure and the use of two contrasting materials: red brick and white marble. Three metres – two internal and one external – are added to the length of the existing house. Each metre is open, closed or glazed. This tripartite division of ‘air, earth and sun’ establishes an elemental structure that spans the width of the house. A blurring of this threshold condition is achieved by positioning this window-wall at an offset from the side of the house, allowing spatial and material continuity between old and new.