Ciara Tracey from www.independent.ie sat in on the talk I gave to House 2016 visitors on Sunday 22 May at the RDS entitled “Ages and Stages: Designing your Home to meet your Family’s Needs”. Here’s her account…
You can see all the images I showed and read some of the comments I made in my blog post here.
I sneaked a break from my stand at house 2016 to chat to Phil Cawley of Today FM about making the most of the work you are planning to your home. You can listen back here, I’m on from 13.20 to 21.57…
Maximising the price that vendors will achieve for a house takes time and effort, but there are professionals ready to do the hard graft. Katy McGuinness meets them. Read more here…
Q: We’ve just completed a major decluttering session in our home – but we’re still overcome with “stuff”! What’s your advice about maximising storage?
A: Good storage is the key to a calm and orderly home. Ideally, there should be a place for everything. This means that no matter how messy your home gets, everything will have a ‘home’ to return to. Spend time going through your house room by room. Start at the front door.
No cloakroom? Think about wall hooks, fixed at 120cm above the floor, high enough for hanging most coats, but below eye level and not visually overwhelming. A ledge above the hooks is useful for keys and post. A hanging rail is best for coats and will need a recess 60cm deep.
Cupboard doors – including doors to the hot press – should be full height to allow access to shelves at a higher level. Fix hooks at varying heights on the back of all cupboard doors and on cupboard walls to hang all sorts of objects.
If you have no space for a utility room, consider creating a 60cm deep laundry cupboard. Place the washing machine and dryer side by side with a counter on top for laundry baskets. A rail 120 cm above this will be perfect for hanging clothes as they air. Add a heated towel rail and a vent to the outside and you have the ideal, year-round laundry solution. A tall slot to one side for the ironing board and clothes horse would be a bonus.
Where possible, shelving should be adjustable, with the holes for shelf supports at 5cm centres. Gather objects of similar heights together and locate the shelves accordingly. This is especially useful in kitchen, bathroom and book storage. Slatted shelves in the hot press should be 30cm apart: any higher and the towels and duvets topple over.
Toys are best stored on open shelves, with separate tubs or baskets for each type of small toy like plastic food and animals.
Rotate toys where space is limited and remember that they get smaller as children get older.
Store out-of-season clothes and accessories in the attic. These are best vacuum-packed, both to save space and to protect items from dust. Label them to make it easy to retrieve items as you need them.
In general, custom-made storage will make best use of every available centimetre and may prove a reasonable option if simple materials, like painted MDF are used.
Your storage needs will evolve constantly. Active, ongoing management of your belongings, combined with flexible storage solutions, are core weapons in today’s battle with “stuff”.
Consider consulting a registered architect, when considering any work or changes to your home, you can find one on riai.ie.
Sunday Independent
I was delighted to help a client refurbish and decorate a beautiful 1980’s apartment in Ranelagh recently. We were both pleased with the quality of space, light & storage we achieved and struck by how the modest apartment was still smaller, at just over 40 square metres, than the new minimum apartment size of 45 square metres. Alanna Gallagher from The Irish Times came to have a look: you can read the full content of the article here…
Home of the Year culminates tonight with just one winner from seven strong finalists from across the country.
The judges – interior designer Hugh Wallace, architect Declan O’Donnell, and textiles and homewares designer Helen James – chose the final seven from a total of 21 houses.
Tonight’s show (8.30pm, RTÉ One) will see the homeowners meet the judges for the first time in Carton House where they’ll finally select the overall winning home from an eclectic mix ranging from a home that’s an ode to the 1960s to a Victorian terrace home in South Dublin.
Which of the final seven homes gets your vote? Read the original article here.
Week 1 – The Extended Cottage
Tom Hayden is a Professor of Zoology and June Kennedy has recently completed her masters in spiritualism. The couple live in their extended cottage in Tipperary.
They first met as teenagers but reconnected nearly 40 years later when June was studying as a mature student and Tom was working as a lecturer. Tom left Dublin to move with June to Tipperary to make their home.
They’ve added to their cottage, extending up so they can take in the spectacular views. Inside, big leather couches, meditation corners, mounted Elk antlers, crosses, candles and trinkets from their travels are all present in their house.
The couple love being here so much they even cancelled their annual trip to the South of France preferring instead to just be at home.
Retired couple, Ita Molloy and Andrew Harvey had a holiday cottage on the site in Castletownbere, Co Cork since 1993 but rebuilt on it and then from summer 2014 have had this beautiful home.
They wanted to build something that was eco-friendly and enlisted the help of Ita’s son, Donn Ponnighaus who is an architect, to design and build a passive house.
The interior is warm and cosy and they are surrounded by incredible views of the mountains and sea of West Cork.
Eva Byrne and Gerard Carty live in South Dublin City with their two children, Vita and Oscar. They are both architects and Eva runs www.houseology.ie and specialises in maximising space, light and storage.
Eva and Gerard built this modern mews house in 2003 and added a rooftop extension in 2012. The house is cleverly designed with every millimetre of space exploited to make a functional but elegant family home.
It includes lots of hidden storage and even a secret bedroom. This versatile mews is fully used and enjoyed by all the family – including Bisto, the dog – and whilst it is largely open plan, manages to appear calm and uncluttered.
Ger Eaton a musician in the band The Carnival Brothers and hairstylist lives with his wife Susann and their two children, Jude and Bowie, in a semi-detached red-brick house in Kildare.
Ger and his wife have a similar taste in fashion and music and both bring that into their home. Ger, in particular, loves to shop around Ireland, and abroad, for original pieces.
They love that each piece in the home has its own story, such as the 1960’s turquoise suite which came from the American Embassy in Dublin.
Feile Butler and Colin Ritchie live in a cob-and-timber-frame home in Co. Sligo. After taking a mud building course in 2005 Feile and Colin set about designing and building their own home.
Feile is an architect and Colin a carpenter so they were able to do the vast majority of the work themselves. The house, completed in 2011, was built from soil excavated on site and over 80% of the other building materials were salvaged.
Sarah Tomkin and her husband live with their four sons in this beach side bungalow in South County Dublin.
The house was originally built in the 1930s with two extensions added on since. This extended family home has a garden that backs out onto the beach.
Art school graduate, Sarah, has a real love of colour, patterns and a natural flare for design. Her design philosophy is simple, nothing should match! The dominant colour in the home is pink, even the exterior of the home is a pale shade of pink.
The house has unusual features like a swing in the middle of the kitchen and a boat in the living room. One of her favourite rooms is the kitchen, as it gets lots of sunshine and is a place where the whole family gathers.
Carla Benedetti lives in a renovated Victorian house in South County Dublin.
Carla is a graphic and interior designer and began the process of renovating this Victorian home in 2010. There is a mix of original with new features throughout the home.
Carla was passionate about respecting her period home while introducing modern architecture and design such as the double height extension at the back of the home.
She favours a darker colour palette in the majority of the home, finding it adds a cosiness to larger spaces.
One of her favourite areas is the downstairs living/dining area, she loves the double doors out to the garden which she designed herself.
The architect who can transform your house without knocking it down…read the original article here.
Eleanor Flegg, Irish Independent 08/05/2015 02:30
My mother once found herself on the bus beside a woman who reads this column. Naturally enough, the conversation came round to interiors. Specifically, my own home. “I would love a glimpse inside her house,” said the woman (meaning mine). “It must be lovely!” Mum was purple in the face trying not to laugh.
I live in a small terraced cottage in Dublin 8 with three men and a dog. There hasn’t been a spare penny since 2009 (funny, that…) and it’s all starting to look a little shabby.
That’s why I was nervous when a ‘houseologist’ came to visit (yes you heard me, a houseologist). Eva Byrne is an architect who doesn’t get involved in building projects. Instead she offers a consultation service that she calls “houseology”. This is basically expert advice on whatever aspect of your home is currently bugging you. It costs between €180 and €360 for a one-off consultation (houseology.ie). She will advise on decorating and storage issues but also on larger projects involving renovation and structural plans.
Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Byrne is undaunted by shabbiness. “If I was judgmental about people’s homes, this wouldn’t work as a business,” she says, carefully stepping over the dog. We’ve decided the flow of light in the north-facing extension at the back of the house is the area in which I need advice. I also need new curtains, double glazing and a paint job.
But I don’t need advice on that. I just need money.
The first thing that Byrne notices is the row of coats in the hall. As she points out, they are pretty much in your face as you come in the door. There’s a two foot gap between the bottom of the longest coat and the floor.
Her suggestion is to lower the row of hooks so that they don’t block your line of vision and soak up the light. I’ve already explained to Byrne that this is a low budget situation. I would like more natural light in the living room, but can’t afford building work. “You’ve got to think about getting light into the house and reflecting it,” she says.
The floor is maple hardwood, recycled from a church hall. To improve the light she suggests I might think about painting it, as she has done in her own house where the floor is a light blue-grey.
The photos of Byrne’s house are by Philip Lauterbach (3.plpix.com) and I thought you’d prefer seeing the inside of her house rather than mine (sorry about that, Mrs Bus Lady).
“People can be reluctant to paint timber but a lot of wood in a space can be oppressive. It’s still wood, even if you paint it.”
Because the aim is to reflect natural light and bounce it around the room, Byrne points out that the windowsills (which have been chewed by the dog) could be painted in a pale colour. “Off-white can be good, but make sure it doesn’t have too much yellow in it and you don’t want it too grey either.”
Likewise my cheap-as-chips kitchen, which is veneered in something that looks like wood, could be offered another lease of life.
“Paint that in off-white and the room will look completely different,” she says.
All the experts seem to agree that, if you are having major work done in the house, it’s worth considering the flow of light at the planning stage.
“A lot of people ask for triple glazing – it’s great for insulation but it reduces the light so much that sometimes it’s not worth the trade-off,” says John Martin of Renova (renova.ie), a company that specialises in renovations. Another tip is to go for windows with slender frames, which can give you 20pc more glass than the cheap bulky window frames.
“Splay the reveals so that the part of the wall around the window spreads out like a trumpet and get the windows as high as you can – if they’re flush with the ceiling, all the better.”
He also recommends you avoid dropped beams because they create areas of darkness on the ceiling and introduce tall doors, ideally the full height of the room.
“First you look at the sun, then you look at the obstacles that are getting in its way, and then you work out how to remove them,” he says.
The thing that I like about my houseologist’s advice, however, is that all her suggestions could be done cheaply and with minimal disruption. And just to challenge her, I bring her up to my younger son’s bedroom, which I tend to view as a pit of despair. She looks at the chaos, counts two harps, three guitars, and a keyboard, and suggests that I should stop giving him a hard time.
“Teenagers are untidy creatures,” she says. “It looks like he’s doing his best with the space – why not just relax about it?”
This is good advice and I’m going to take it. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is nothing at all.
Indo Property
When RTE was looking for an Architect Today with Sean O’Rourke this morning, I was delighted to oblige. Together with Finbarr Holland of Keystone Construction, we discussed the type of work people are doing to their homes as well as the benefits of involving an architect in your home building project.
Seán O’Rourke: “A lot of people might be inclined to say ‘look, I’ll save myself some money, I won’t get an architect on board.’ What do you think of this approach?
Eva Byrne:
If you want to give your growing children more space but can’t afford to move, it’s time to think creatively and aim high, which is exactly what one Dublin couple did. By Dara Flynn.
