Q. Hi Kieran
What is the best house advice you were ever given?
Thank you
Evelyn Homan
East Cork
A. Hi Ev
When I read this, I thought, ok this is a special question and, to be fair, it could go in any direction, so I didn’t give myself much time to answer it. I wanted to answer it with the right answer, not the best answer. The answer that I think is the most fundamentally correct. Here goes.
I remember the day well. I was at a site meeting in an old house in West Cork. I was chatting to a client and an architect and we got on to the subject of house design. I can’t remember the exact context but I guess it was in relation to the house we were in and how the spatial design was off. Typically it was a rectangular shape and the house was confined by the formal floor plan. As the architect looked at it he exclaimed, ‘the house has been designed from the outside in, not the inside out’.
I thought this was profound. Most houses are like this. They are a simple shape, a square, a rectangle, maybe an L or even a H. But that makes no difference. A house is for living in and enjoying spatial flow and daylight not for admiring its physical from from outside. How did this happen?
When you think back to the old Irish cottage. It’s a simple shape. Generally a rectangle with a thatched roof. So a large open area to begin with, with the open fire and the crane (for cooking). This was the day to day living room, dining room and kitchen. The rest of the rooms were bedrooms or perhaps a parlour if you were lucky. The house design reflected our society at the time. We needed shelter, refuge and community from our homes. As primitive as they were, these traditional cottages performed well. They were even quite warm with their rammed earth floors, thick stone and lime walls and thatched roofs.
Beyond this era, and into the 20th century, building methods changed dramatically. The biggest change was the move from stone to blockwork. This began with block breeze blocks (very thick and heavy) and graduated into a blockwork cavity (inner leaf and outer leaf) in the 1970’s. This also facilitated building housing at scale and the advent of the builder developer. As the world economy grew and housing demand soured, we built more and more houses from blockwork. A straight road ran down the middle of the new housing estate, semi detached houses on the left and right as you drove in. Not much has changed today (though the houses are now A-rated).
I grew up in one of these housing estates, Suncourt in Midleton. If you lived in one of these estates, if one person carried out any level of home improvement, it caught on like wildfire. Double glazed windows, PVC fascias & gutters, a glass porch. It was an arms race.
I remember one weekend my mother announced we were getting a new ‘fancy’ kitchen. We were sent away to a mobile home for the weekend while Dad knocked the wall between our kitchen and our dining room. He also removed the dining room window and fitted a sliding door to the garden. A few years later we arrived home with a flatpack conservatory. He installed the frame and I was given the task of clipping on the wire brackets to hold on the glass. (It must have leaked like a sieve!). It was crude but it signalled that people’s needs were changing. This was the 90’s. Society had changed. People had now begun to redesign their homes from the inside out. No longer was the house just a place in which to eat, sleep and shelter. We needed spatial flow. We needed access to the garden. We needed to capture as much daylight as possible. Sure, the conservatory was crude, it was too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter but from a floor plan design perspective it was groundbreaking. We were now redesigning our homes from the inside out.
When we design a new one off home today it starts with a compass. The sun rises in the East and passes through South as it sets in the West. This does not change so you need to orientate your kitchen and living space around this and, for privacy, this is generally the rear of your home. Consequently the front door and hallway are on the opposite elevation. It’s the same upstairs. The landing faces North while all the rooms off it face South.
The modern living space is generally a kitchen dining area with some connection to a casual living area and then a second separate living room elsewhere. The kitchen faces south east, dining South and living South West flowing out onto a patio to capture the evening sun or some combination of the above depending on your exact orientation and capturing views on your site. Rooms like utilities, plant rooms, WC’s etc are sited in more low profile areas. Once the floor plans are completed, they are rationalised and the result forms your finished house shape and elevations. Now houses are designed from the inside out.
The difference is immense. The effect is that living in such a house is intuitive. The spaces work, the light follows you throughout the day and your mood changes. It elevates you.
Kieran McCarthy is a building engineer and director of KMC Homes bespoke A-Rated new home builder, serving Cork and Limerick. He is also co-presenter of the RTÉ property show Cheap Irish Homes. Check out KMC Homes’ brand new website kmchomes.ie
Follow Kieran on instagram @kierankmc for more home building information, tips and Q&A advice.
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