Carroll Ó Súilleabháin Architects — Works & Writings.

The brief was deceptively simple: two general-purpose classrooms, a special-education teaching room and a resurfaced play yard, delivered against the Department of Education's standard cost-metric (€5,385 / m² at the time of tender). What wasn't simple was the siting — the school sits on a drumlin, and the only level ground faced due north. We rotated the block four degrees off the principal axis to pick up morning light from the east gable and placed clerestories above the north-facing teaching wall.

The construction is a straightforward insulated cavity wall with brick outer leaf, chosen to sit calmly beside the 1961 main building. The roof is a warm-deck single-ply with PV-ready conduits run at first-fix. Services are routed in an acoustic ceiling void so that a future re-subdivision of the classrooms is a ceiling job, not a walls job. Project value €1,142,400 incl. VAT, delivered 1.8% under the tender cost plan.

Planning was straightforward; Part 8 consultation raised one valid concern about the existing boundary trees, which we resolved by moving the SEN room three metres north and holding the mature ash along the eastern boundary. The building was handed over in time for the September 2024 intake.

A protected-structure extension is an exercise in restraint. The existing house is a mid-terrace Victorian on the south side of Rathmines, four bays deep with a return that had been knocked out and poorly rebuilt in the 1970s. The client wanted a contemporary kitchen-dining room that read clearly as a new intervention — not a pastiche — while repairing the original fabric where it had been damaged.

The extension is a single volume on a Portuguese limestone floor, with a steel-and-oak roof structure left exposed overhead. The connection to the original house is a one-metre-deep glazed slot; from the hall you read the line where old meets new. The return masonry was stripped back to the original rubble stone, lime-repointed, and left exposed on the internal face. Project value €418,000 incl. VAT, completed Q3 2022 to a 14-month programme including conservation pre-works.

Planning was granted without conditions following a pre-application consultation with Dublin City Council's conservation officer — a process we recommend to every protected-structure client before a line is drawn. The drawings were issued in sets to the builder at shell, first-fix, second-fix and snag, which is more paperwork than a standard contract but is what a conservation brief deserves.