![]() ![]() The reason cited was the required bedroom-to-garden ratio, and only the third proposal for an unbuilt 45m2 one-bedroom bungalow was approved. The house was built on a chunk of the adjacent garden bought by the architect’s family after two planning applications submitted by the previous owner for a semi-detached facsimile had already been rejected. Rather than design high-precision exposed concrete frames or masonry that require expensive craftsmen, Leech is interested in the applied arts, in ‘building with tolerance and then distracting with elaboration’, investing time in the assembly of finishes to mask inexpensive construction. ‘Hiding in plain sight, Holybrook Grove house imitates its politely pebbledashed neighbours with a boiling crust of gluey porridge slung onto walls with joyful abandon’ The exorbitant cost of quality craftsmanship, he says, ‘keeps the world of architecture out of the suburbs and something only for the middle classes who can afford skilled makers and craftspeople’. ![]() ![]() The cost of this house per square metre was some 30 per cent cheaper than that quoted by highly skilled contractors. Leech is critical of ‘intellectual follies’ created at great expense for wealthy patrons, and describes craft as ‘exclusive’ and ‘elitist’. Hollybrook Grove is ‘not a typical Irish house’ he argues, indicating its casual disregard of structural expression, which he believes runs contrary to a ‘very clear identity in Irish architecture’. Having studied at University College Dublin, he claims this purist ambition was a result of ‘the Modernist teaching in Irish architecture schools and a rooted belief in phenomenology’. In this small house, each idea finds space to speak quietly.Īmong the most dramatic shifts was this relaxation in attitude towards what Leech refers to as material ‘honesty’: a ‘puritanical aspiration’ for the external expression of structural materiality. The house is effervescent with germinating theories, thoughts and details, coaxed into cohesion by a decade of consequent experience at Caruso St John and Herzog & de Meuron. ‘In the end, it became a refurbishment project of a building that had never existed’, he admits. He admits he ‘almost felt like a different architect’ returning to the project after nearly a decade. The Hollybrook Grove house was the architect’s first independent project, started while working at Tom de Paor’s office and at 6a, but it wasn’t until 2016, when the Irish economy picked up, that the house was constructed and Leech established his own practice in London. Instead, the churning roughcast skin hides a sizeable steel structure. The contractor, concerned for his reputation, required some convincing that this was the desired effect.īut this distinctive ‘cauliflower’ roughcast was not the original plan: when first designed in 2008, Leech had envisioned a cast-concrete structure with a brutalist bush-hammered finish to emulate the local pebbledash. Roughcast – in which the aggregate is mixed with mortar before being thrown onto walls, rather than left exposed and pressed onto the mortared surface, as with pebbledash – is a material familiar to local tradesmen, though here it is amplified to uncouth cementitious gobs. Hiding in plain sight in a cul-de-sac of ’40s semis in the north-eastern Dublin suburb of Clontarf, an intruder imitates its politely pebbledashed neighbours with a boiling crust of gluey porridge slung onto walls with joyful abandon – or ‘like cauliflower’ as Leech describes. ‘Looking around the house is like watching a language find its tongue, a thesis assembling itself before your eyes’ In Dublin, pebbledash is having something of a renaissance now, its material merits and historic significance reassessed and reimagined for the 21st century by young Irish architectural practices including TAKA, GKMP and Steve Larkin Architects, as well as London-based but Dublin-born David Leech Architects. In fact, this scorned material has Roman roots and had a noble renaissance at the turn of the 20th century, when it was applied liberally to Arts and Crafts houses by architects including Lutyens, Voysey and Rennie Mackintosh. With an unfortunate association with the shoddily built semis it caked unflatteringly after the Second World War, both it, and roughcast – its close cousin – have a public-image problem, stripping period properties of character, charm and 5 per cent of their market value. AR House highly commended: The practice’s first house, in a quiet suburb, is a bubbling collage of germinating ideas, clever references and meticulous details ![]()
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