Wejchert architects' Killiney home reflects founders’ design style

On a site that was once the vegetable patch of Kilbogget House, on Balure Lane, off Church Road, Killiney architects Andrzej and Danuta Wejchart, the husband and wife team behind the renowned architects’ firm A&D Wejchert & Partners built their family home.

Andrzej came to Ireland from Poland in 1964 when, though not yet 30, he won an international competition to design the administration building at UCD in Belfield. He and Danuta built up one of Dublin’s best-known architects’ firms. Following Danuta’s death last year – Andrzej died in 2009 – their house is now for sale for €1.1 million through Sherry FitzGerald.

Carillion is very much of its time, brick-built with bespoke tinted windows and ahead-of- their time solar panels.

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Low set, as if to immerse you in the surrounding gardens, the property opens into a dark hall that gives no sense of the light-filled lounge at its end, a room of bare brick, a style that has returned to fashion, a concrete-detailed fireplace and neat bookcases filled with books on architecture and interior design, tomes that their daughter Agneszka Wejchert Pearson recalls poring over as a young girl.

From here the gardens make the house feel tranquil and much more remote than the few minutes it is from the M50.

Exercise pool

Steps from the lounge lead up to a double-height dining area with huge windows. Agneszka, who is also an architect and runs Mundo Architecture with her husband in the UK, recalls discussing design ideas at the table with her parents. They included her suggestion for the staircase in The Helix that her father implemented.

Well-tended plants have flourished in this atrium-like space but more could be made of it. The galley kitchen, a dark masculine space with dark oak laminate units and black stone counters connects these two rooms. It is small by today’s standards. One option would be to integrate the kitchen out into the diningroom and turn the current kitchen into a den.

A room off the diningroom housing an exercise pool, sauna and Jacuzzi was added later. Turning this into a playroom would make more sense to a young family.

Design features

A red steel staircase leads up to the bedrooms which all have garden views from their windows and roof lights. The master features a platform bed that would have been ultra modern in the early 1980s but won’t be everyone’s cup of tea now. It also appears small by today’s standards. The other three are double-height spaces that have sleeping areas and a secondary mezzanine level each accessed via a ladder cum bookshelf – every design feature in this house has a function.

The house is set on about 0.5 acre of well-planted gardens that include some huge pine trees and a macrocarpa cypress. A peaceful, tranquil space, the house extends to 250 sq m (2,690sq ft) and includes an adjoining small granny flat and garage.

Also on the lane is Bracken Hill, another architect-built four-bedroom detached house built in the same year, on about one acre, and asking €1.2 million through Ganly Waters.