David Leech House

The house is situated in a garden at the end of a short terrace of a 1940s suburban estate on the edge of Dublin. The site is bounded to the south by an existing hedge, to the north-west by the blank wall of the original terrace and to the north-east by a high wall backing onto a public lane.

The steel beams that cantilever out from the central core of this compact three-bedroom detached house enable much of the ground floor perimeter to be structureless, wrapped by glazed screens of folding floor-to-ceiling panels. The screens can be pulled back, concertina-like, to merge the two living rooms almost completely with the surrounding garden.

Much of the external wall surfaces are covered in roughly trowelled render, a common local weatherproofing. Above, a slate roof rises sharply to a thick, chimney-like structure. This one contains a skylight that lights the core of the house, as well as an extract for an MVHR system and a flue for a wood-burning stove. The slates are held and punctuated by copper grampians, the copper picked up in gutters and a downpipe that cuts diagonally across the blank plastered upper storey.

The back façade to the lane, in contrast to the garden elevations, is finished in a smoother render, solid except for a porthole which lights the bathroom on the first floor. The roofline is sliced off here, forming the shape of a gable, with the wall below animated by the traced relief of a door and window, together describing the simple figure of a house.

Internally, the rooms work around a roughly cruciform core. One thicker arm is formed by a WC and storage, while the foot of the stair, an inbuilt kitchen counter and a wall of kitchen storage backing onto the hearth form the others.

The floor surface is struck in-situ concrete throughout – left unfinished in part due to the cost of polishing – but also intended to increase the inside/outside terrace-like feeling in the rooms. The three bedrooms are lined, floored and cupboarded using Valchromat in different colours.