Property News · July 15, 2018

Dublin storeys: how two townhouses were brought back to life


A pair of Regency homes in the Irish capital were restored and transformed – but they still have a tale to tell…Behind every historic facade lurks a tale of social and economic upheaval. Take those belching, satanic factories which once lined the waterways of Britain. Now many of these relics of the Industrial Revolution have been cleaned up and converted into apartments, and rebranded by estate agents as desirable waterside living. Or consider those grandiose Edwardian banks with their forests of fat stone columns and coffered ceilings, doomed by digital disruption to be turned from temples of commerce into members’ clubs or all-day drinking dens.Colm Doyle’s Dublin home has had a similarly tumultuous past. Built in the early 19th century for prosperous Anglo-Irish lawyers, the two adjacent townhouses were bought by a building society in the 1960s. The brickwork was clad in what Doyle, an architect, calls “modernism on the cheap” – concrete slabs and the ground floor knocked into an open-plan space with a sprawling extension added at the back. Then came the credit crunch of 2008. The bank collapsed and the five-storey building slid into decay before it was repossessed by the state. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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