DK Residence
This suburban house in Whiteabbey has been refurbished and extended to better meet the owners’ changing needs and allow them to express a new design aesthetic with the addition of some quality extensions.
- DK Residence
- Refurbishment and Additions to Chalet Bungalow
- Whiteabbey, Co Antrim
- Completed March 2021
With a quickly growing family this couple needed additional living space and just more room to live together as a family. The location of the house suited them so they wanted to stay if they could find a design and the space they needed.
Situated in a leafy part of Whiteabbey convenient to the train station and sea walks the original house enjoyed a much larger plot before it was subdivided. While well maintained, the accommodation was cellular and without a heart. The aim of the project was to reorder the living accommodation to create an open plan kitchen living dining area that had privacy from the road and access to the garden. Externally more green space was created at the expense of the largely paved terraces. As well as reorganising the interior there were two modern extensions providing a new dining area and entrance porch.
This project illustrates how the accommodation in a house can be rearranged to suit a smaller garden and how subtle and legible additions can create an eclectic and harmonic interest to the existing house in its gardens. Bringing space and light and people together while capturing the best views made the project a success.
For this small church, the conversion to a domestic function seemed natural and uncontentious. The scale of the original church building was domestic and the decoration modest. The new function also modest and singular in purpose in that it is for a new family or people to live together in “under one roof”. Tattykeeran Church may have become simply 44 Tattykeeran Road but it is still there for those who were baptised or married in it to see and we hope it has been presented in such a way that the sensibilities of those people and the significance of those community and life events are not slighted but preserved. Certainly the comments and words from many interested visitors and parishoners to the project during construction (among them the Sunday school teacher, the sextons son) would indicate that it has been a success in this respect. A further gesture and nod of approval has come from vestry committee of the surviving Colebrooke Estate church who have reintrusted us with the original bell (it is suitably minus the clapper) made in Murphys Foundry in Dublin.
