Down by the river

INTERIORS:The transformation of a Dublin city apartment into a lofty, light space shows how cramped, poorly planned flats can be given a new life, writes Emma Cullinan

THE STRIKING ASPECT of this apartment beside Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge is the view of the Liffey visible from every part of it, but when Dardo Barbini bought it two years ago you would never have known the river was there when you came in through the front door.

“It was horrendous,” says Barbini, recalling the time he first saw the apartment but he immediately knew that his long search for a place to buy was over. “I liked the views and location,” says Dardo, who grew up in the centre of Buenos Aires. “Having lived in a city in Argentina, noise was not an issue for me.”

He just needed an architect to solve the interior puzzle. To squash two bedrooms, a livingroom, kitchen and bathroom into this compact home, the original developers plumbed a bathroom in beside the front door and put a bedroom beyond it so that the internal entrance hallway was a thin, dark corridor that snaked diagonally towards the second bedroom, a livingroom beyond and a tiny, window-free kitchen to the back. “When I saw inside the horrible tiny kitchen I didn’t know how such a thing could be allowed,” says Barbini.

The building is an early Zoe Developments project on Bachelor’s Walk, and has Georgian overtones, although the elements are off-scale: the period-style front door is too thin, the mock-Georgian fireplace was electric and the mullions in the windows are too fat and – whoops – in places, the suspended ceiling came down over the tops of the windows.

Some original elements had been kept, including the round-topped windows in the bathroom which were in the McGrath tea warehouse building that used to be here and which was where project architect Stephen Mulhall’s mother used to work.

Barbini found A2 Architects on the RIAI (Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland) website: “I wanted to change a lot of things and to get ideas, which I didn’t think I would get from a builder. I also wanted somebody to give me a budget.”

Barbini’s original idea was to get rid of one of the bedrooms. The architects suggested dispensing with both of them, and putting the bed in the living space and closing it off with a sliding door – a reference to the Schröder House in the Netherlands by architect Gerrit Rietveld – to create a flexible living space. But in the end Barbini went without the sliding door and has his bed on display in the living room. “When I saw the space I was happy to leave it all open-plan,” says the self-confessed clutter hater. So he doesn’t mind visitors communing around the bed? “I only have visitors who I know very well,” he says.

The architects have created a contemporary space but also worked with what was already here in terms of the existing building and the location.

Where there were Georgian copies there are now Georgian references. Industrial steel beams on the walls, which were coyly and tackily boxed in, have been exposed “in a reference to a Georgian cornice in a rough manner,” says Mulhall.

“You can expose these things in apartments and celebrate the constrictions,” says Peter Carroll, of A2 Architects. “They are not fine details but contemporary modern details that shouldn’t be ignored.”

The vivid red ceiling also recalls the Georgian era, and the architects chose it because they like the way that, when you walk around Dublin, you can look into Georgian buildings and see coloured ceilings. “Here you can look up at a colour that you would expect to see on a wall in a grand room in Dublin but it’s almost like car paint.”

“I thought they were crazy when they suggested it,” says Barbini, who has grown to like it. The ceiling has been highly varnished to reflect the light emanating around the Liffey. It involved putting a layer of varnish over paint, sanding it down and varnishing it again, then sanding and varnishing once more. “It’s like the door at 10 Downing Street,” says Carroll. “Which has an almost glass-like quality.”

Apartments built today must have outdoor space, but this block was constructed before such regulations. “The Liffey Street trees give a beautiful dappled light that is reflected inside the apartment and the owner can enjoy this as a seminal outdoor space if he opens all the sash windows,” says Carroll.

The minimalist Barbini has not got around to buying curtains yet, because he wants to spend a year seeing what it is like living with the rising and setting sun.

Carroll didn’t fret about elements that couldn’t be changed, such as the sash windows. “They were not very well made and the mullions are just that little bit too thick, but if you just accept those things and try not to be too precious you can bring the attention of the eye to something else, in details such as the relation of a shelf to a lower unit.”

The architect and client both praise builder Eamon Mulligan, who came to this job after spending 15 years in New York – away for the boom and back for the recession, but it was time to return to family and to Irish schools for his children.

No stranger to inner-city projects, Mulligan worked on fit-outs in the Empire State Building and Twin Towers (he was in Manhattan on the day they came down and a dominant memory is the blizzard of dust).

After stripping back the apartment to its basics – including taking out that awkward internal corridor and putting in MDF storage units – the architects added interest and texture in light levels, details and materials.

Mulligan made the units, which Carroll describes as having a mid sheen, while the rubber floor has a soft sheen and that varnished ceiling has a high sheen.

Illumination, too, has been varied between task and ambient lighting, including uplighting above cupboards at ceiling height, to reflect that red gloss. The gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling gives a floating feeling as does the space between the base of units and the floor. “It gives a sense of the floor and ceiling continuing on, a sense of the extension of space,” says Carroll. “Such articulations can make a very big difference to a small space.”

Mirrors at the back of the shelving units also extend the space and reflect light, an idea the architects borrowed from Sir John Soane’s museum in London. Now when you enter the apartment the Liffey light hits you, albeit through the glass door to the bathroom: bouncing in through the window and off the marble floor.

There will be a lot of retrofitting like this in Ireland, to release strained spaces. “The future of architecture in this country seems to be about retrofitting and making up for the mistakes from the past from a sustainable and economic point of view,” says Carroll.

“There was a whole generation of these apartments with really poor space standards and internal kitchens and bathrooms. This shows the way forward to adapting them for the future.”

“In the 1990s many huge apartment blocks had no sense of internal quality,” says Mulhall. “We are interested in how people live in these spaces and how to improve the quality with a few simple moves.”

Barbini is happy: “They gave me things I had never thought of.” So now he can enjoy city living. “I like watching people from the window: it’s entertaining and you feel a real buzz.”