Underfloor heating would have meant chopping up the floorboards for firewood in Frank McCourt's day in the lanes of Limerick, but his new replica home has the latest technology to take away one of the authentic scourges of the 1930s, the damp.
"If you did not do it you are definitely going to have a location prone to damp," said Mr John King of Shannon Heritage.
The replica "slum" home has been built in a Georgian coach house behind Pery Square and will reopen next month for its first full tourist season. Complete with the stove from Alan Parker's screen version of Angela's Ashes, period furniture and a fake puddle, the house appropriately backs on to one of the infamous lanes of Limerick.
Mr King said the initial £80,000 development, which is being carried out by the Civic Trust, could be expanded depending on the project's success.
He hopes to get Mr McCourt to visit the exhibition later this year.
The building which housed Leamy's National School, named in Angela's Ashes, also faces on to the lane and still has its original sash windows in the basement. "Part of it is taken over by businesses, but other parts could become available for interpretation," Mr King said.
The permanent Angela's Ashes exhibition opened last June as part of a tour which includes No 2 Pery Square, a Georgian home built in 1938.
The 23-room house, designed by James Pain, has been restored and includes original detail flooring, marbled walls, plasterwork, doors and windows.