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Architects: Jake Moulson Architects
- Area: 750 m²
- Year: 2017
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Photographs:Tim Crocker, Mitsuko Moulson
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Lead Architect: Jake Moulson
Text description provided by the architects. D2 Townhouse is a 5-story Georgian dwelling in a conservation area of Dublin, now largely commercial. The building is distinguished from its neighbors by a substantial garden containing one of the few remaining original coach-houses in Dublin, highly significant in conservation. D2 Townhouse is JM’s first solo project. Discovered in a state of dilapidation, with insensitive, utilitarian additions, the building needed returning from its recent office use into a single family home.
Through dialogues between art, design, science and fictions, historical references and contemporary technological techniques, we amplified and revived its spatial drama. Through deep engagement with the family, the house’s history and its context, we attended to every detail. Our aim was to make each space distinct, with a palpable atmosphere.
Informed by the building’s existing patterns, forms and, above all, light, our strategic, minimal extensions are conceived as inhabitable windows, reflecting, refracting, and drawing inhabitants between areas. We designed key items of furniture to work architecturally, magnifying tones and augmenting spaces while leaving historic fabric intact. Materially, our bespoke cast iron cladding, laser-etched steel floor, mirrored reveals, brass overlays and burnt wainscoting contrast brightness and deep shadow.
Our unique thermoformed Corian and concrete kitchen, opening onto the garden, is geological – its rippled surface absorbing and diffusing light. Our cantilevered quartzite toilet, above the winter garden, melts into the sky. Installing innovative sub-basement ventilation, bat cavities and planting for biodiversity, we also look to the building’s future as a multi-referential home, restrained and flamboyant, for all kinds of lives.
