Scullion Architects complete the quietly playful refurbishment of a Victorian terraced house just outside Dublin’s city centre, combining concealed doorways and bespoke carpentry to create a spacious and thoughtfully sequenced home.

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Peter Molloy

Tucked into a quiet square on the edge of Dublin’s city centre, Havelock by Scullion Architects reworks a modest Victorian terrace into a sequence of compact but carefully composed spaces.

Within the constraints of a two bedroom house, the design explores how subtle changes to the plan, and thoughtful carpentry, can create layered arrangements of circulation and living spaces. Retaining its traditional street frontage, the front portion of the house largely maintains its original layout with the living room sitting behind a street-facing sash window.

Pivoting bookcases and built in storage maximise open space and are used as transitional tools creating soft boundaries between the more formal spaces to the front of the plan, and loosely sequenced rear. A banquette bench with built in shelving threads through the combined kitchen, living, and dining area, snaking into a bench that runs in front of the iroko-lined windows that frame the garden.

The lower level reads as a chain of spaces, each defined by low level, built-in furniture and changes in orientation. While the front of the house sits perpendicular to the square, the garden kinks to an irregular angle at the back. This angle is reflected in the organisation of the kitchen units which subtly shift in response to the skewed geometry of the site. Floor tiles slip gently out of alignment, their pattern responding to cranked garden walls.

Resulting misalignments create a series of niches surfaces that support everyday nestling in of the site; offering spaces for books and objects. As the house unfolds from front to back, the character of the interiors gradually relaxes, with rooms becoming increasingly domestic and personal as you move through the spaces, upwards and towards the rear: materials become warmer and joinery more playful. It is an example of how the refurbishment of a conventional terraced house can be a fun opportunity to re-consider the traditional living sequence, and experiment through moments of concealed doorways, and incremental shifts in vistas. 

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