Charleville House / Scullion Architects

Text description provided by the architects. This project breathes new life into a compact artisan cottage in Dublin’s north inner city. Using a strategy of only removing what was dilapidated, we leave remnants of previous extensions, allowing us to re-imagine a new two-story intervention, like a ship-in-a-bottle within the shell of the old single-story cottage.

Two centrally located rooftop light wells penetrate the upper floor, drawing sun in from above, providing shafts of light into the middle of the house, and offering borrowed natural light to the upstairs bathroom via two fully glazed end walls.

The new materials used outside are machined, metallic, and reflective. This draws the beauty out of the ad-hoc disorder of the surrounding Dublin inner-city backlands. Contrasting material oppositions of sharp versus rough seek to reclaim the now maligned technique of contrast as a means of heightening the presence of place.