This Belfast home, designed by the architect who lives in it, is up for the prestigious Manser Medal from the RIBA, writes Emma Cullinan
A BELFAST house designed by an architect for his own family is on the shortlist for the RIBA Manser Medal (see panel). The house, which was designed by Kieran McGonigle, a partner in Belfast architects Twenty Two Over Seven, has already picked up an RIBA award and an RSUA (Royal Society of Ulster Architects) gong (along with the associated Liam McCormick prize).
Northern houses have had a good run in the Manser shortlist recently with homes in Cultra, Co Down, by Hackett + Hall architects and Randalstown, Co Antrim, by Alan Jones Architects being up for it last year.
Twenty Two Over Seven is in good company in the 2008 Manser shortlist, which comprises houses by Richard Rogers's new practice Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners; a Cambridge housing scheme (that is also on the Stirling prize shortlist) by an architectural team including well-established Feilden Clegg Bradley; a swanky apartment in Notting Hill by Gianni Botsford Architects; and a house by Simon Conder, who is also working on a housing project in China with Herzog and de Meuron.
McGonigle never planned to design and build his own home but when he was househunting for his growing family, he found it difficult to find something suitable in the neighbourhood to the south-east of Belfast city that he lived in and liked.
Then he and his wife Rachel saw a site for sale in someone's back garden and, despite its limitations, realised that this would enable the couple to build something that suited them and those in their extended family, including a wheelchair user.
The house has been built sideways relative to the house in front of it (and the road) and what first greets you is a serene white gable end which, with its pitched roof, offers an outline we innately associate with a typical house. If a child were asked to draw a house, this would be the result, except that the offset, upscaled, low and high windows here indicate that thought has gone into the design, personal needs have been addressed and convention has been played with.
Clues as to the location of the front door are given by the site of a passageway to the right of the gable end. Once you set off towards the front door, a dark stained wood pergola lines the passageway, providing an eventful arrival that is enhanced by a mighty front door. The ground floor has been split into a family side and formal end, reached along a wide, tall corridor that runs perpendicular to the front door.
The house is one room deep with its sparsely windowed back to the north, against weather and neighbours requiring privacy, while the house opens out to the south to embrace any sun and a strip of wasteland (which McGonigle plans to turn into a woodland with the agreement of the school that owns it).
The pivot between family and formal is, quite appropriately, a flexi-space which is usually a study but turns into a bedroom when their guest in a wheelchair visits (with wide doors and generous halls allowing for the delivery of a hospital bed).
The formal sittingroom, with wide oak floors, inbuilt, low-lying shelving/seating made from local Mourne granite, is at the opposite end of the long house to the diningroom/kitchen and playroom which sits out in the garden.
All of the ground floor rooms spill onto the long, thin garden which is a series of separate courtyard spaces, defined by planting, overhanging structures and semi-walls, with the formal area sitting beside the formal room and the dining area outside the kitchen.
The house is filled with such supplements to standard: where there could have been one long outdoor space, there is a series; and where the dark-stained hardwood framing the glass walls could have been plain fat planes, they are stepped with the uprights expressed, to look like supporting columns (the stepping feeling like a nod to Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld).
Being his own client meant that McGonigle could do these things without delay or discussion. "You don't have to talk through ideas." He visited the site about three times a week, and completed the 232sq m (2,500sq ft) house on a strict budget - of £185,000 (€235,000).
Other distinctive details include having the playroom offset at the end of the long house (whose shape was dictated by the site); a concrete pergola extending beyond this; a neat - but chic - kitchen where others may have gone for copious cabinetry; and deep window reveals of 40cm in the 56cm thick gables, designed to recall traditional Irish cottages.
These cleverly restrict diagonal views into the main bedroom at the back of the house - only revealing a reveal rather than a bedroom wall.
Neighbours are in a row of beautiful period redbricks sitting to one side, with regimented chimneys marching into the distance. (And a hole in the hedge allows children to visit each other).
Below the bedroom window is a flat roof in standing-seam lead, whose standing seams are wider and more rounded than standard: "When you have a craftsman on the building team - as we did - you should use them," says McGonigle.
The main roof is in slate, and those two roof materials express this house's combination of vernacular and new. Having slotted in between period houses, this home represents a polite new neighbour whose form fits in with local customs and yet which hides a creative and open soul.
Irish judges of Stirling Prize
THIS ISLAND is well represented in the UK's biggest architectural award, the Stirling Prize, run by the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects).
Two of this year's judges come from these shores: Shelly McNamara of Grafton Architects and garden designer Diarmuid Gavin, who was drafted in after TV presenter Lauren Laverne pulled out due to clashing schedules.
Their tough task is to choose a winner from a station in Amsterdam by Grimshaw and Aarcadis; a justice centre in Manchester by Denton Corker Marshall; a station in Austria by Zaha Hadid Architects; the London Royal Festival Hall revamp by Allies and Morrison; a school in London by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and a Feilden Clegg Bradley/Alison Brooks Architects/Macreanor Lavington housing scheme in Cambridge.
At the RIBA Stirling Prize dinner in Liverpool on October 11th the Manser Medal, for a residential project, will also be awarded and the above house, in Belfast, is on the shortlist.
