Evolutionary Design Principles
Eleanor Flegg discovers a seamless conjunction between the old and new in a white-bricked Scandinavian-influenced family home

Just as the proof of any pudding is in the eating, the proof of an interior is in how it performs over time rather than how it looks when new. This is a fact often underplayed by the interiors industry, which depends on convincing people that their houses need constant attention. Consequently we have developed a makeover mentality, subjecting our homes to frequent cosmetic overhauls. In reality almost any interior will look good under a fresh coat of paint—the whole showhouse ethos depends upon it—but this is decoration rather than design and an ephemeral business. Without ignoring the contribution that new curtains and a lick of paint can make, a well designed house should stand the test of time, both inside and out. In this respect Crowley House in Dalkey has been tried, tested, and not found wanting.

The site, which housed a semi-derelict cottage, was purchased in 1972 at a furniture auction. The cottage was then demolished and the present house built three years later. Although it was extended and refurbished in 2001 to make room for a growing family, the renovations were in keeping with the original building and the essence of the design has not changed a great deal since the house was built in 1975. In a hardworking family home you soon discover the practical value of design and it is a tough call for any building, especially one that is not particularly large, to meet the changing demands of thirty years of living. Children have been born into the house, grown up, left home, and continue to come and go. ‘The reason that I’m convinced it worked so well’, says architect David Crowley, ‘is that none of them ever wanted to move, even when they were teenagers and it was cramped.’

The building itself is unusual and rather beautiful, full of curves and angles. Its most noticeable feature is the tower that rises at the front part of the structure and from which the living areas radiate. The tower is hard to forget when you talk about the house; somehow the conversation keeps coming back to it. The site came with the restriction that the outside wall must be curved to allow access to a series of garages down the lane at the side of the site. Rather than see this as a limitation, architect David Crowley felt that the obvious thing to do was to replicate the curve of the wall within the structure of the house itself. Thus the tower came into being, forming a fulcrum around which the rest of the house pivots, and taking reference from the Martello towers that punctuate this part of the coast. The house is innovative, even for today, but in the 1970s it must have seemed extraordinary. Nevertheless it appears very much at home in its surroundings, sitting in the middle of Dalkey Village with the air of a house that belongs. It respects the adjacent cottages in terms of scale, and is not the only atypical structure to be successfully absorbed into the eclectic architecture of Dalkey, which has a higgledy-piggledy quality that keeps it on the right side of twee.

The architect must be a prophet in the true sense of the term’ wrote Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) ‘If he can’t see at least ten years ahead don’t call him an architect.’ Since many elements of the design are currently in vogue, and may be seen elsewhere, it is difficult to appreciate just how radical the Crowley House must have originally appeared. It foreshadows more recent developments and both technology and design have caught up with it over the last decades. The expanses of glass, for example, are almost taken for granted in buildings of the 21st century, but this was built before the days of affordable double glazing and before the advances in technology that transformed glass into a popular building material. The huge sloping rooflights that allow natural light to flood the living areas were almost unheard of at the time. Similarly, it is currently fashionable for garden areas to be presented as an extension of the interior, and vice versa. In a manner that predates many more modern instances, the floor tiling in the living area follows the curve of the tower and continues into the courtyard, linking the indoors to the outdoors in both material and form. Traces of the style that we commonly associate with the 1970s, however, remain in a section of diagonal panelling on the interior living room wall, which previously offered access to the back courtyard. This is a memento of the original exterior panelling, very much of its time, as shown in pre-renovation photographs.

The idea of using white painted brick, both inside and out, was borrowed from the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), who adapted the stark forms of Modernism into a style that Crowley describes as ‘Cosy Modern’. The principles of functionalism, which determine the form of an article according to its use, are important in Aalto’s work but his designs also carry that sense of effortlessness that is particularly Scandinavian. White brick structures are unusual in Ireland, both then and now, and it is a relatively expensive building material. ‘This is a house about shape,’ says Crowley. ‘The use of brick accentuates the shapes and forms in the design; the curve of the tower, the angle of the staircase…’ . The use of brick on the interior walls also proved of practical advantage when his children were small as the textured surface, although white, did not show the dirt.

Crowley House also draws inspiration from the ‘organic architecture’ of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose famous design for Fallingwater (1937) abandons the requirement for a garden as a buffer zone and sets the house directly in the wild landscape, standing over a natural rocky waterfall. Lloyd Wright described organic architecture as having ‘the strength and lightness of the spiders’ spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground’. ‘I like the way that he connects a series of different elements together,’ says Crowley, whose own house is a series of interconnected spaces and planes. The two main spaces within the house are planned around two courtyards; the front courtyard faces southwest and contains the curved exterior wall of the tower, echoed by the external boundary wall. The open plan living areas are arranged around the courtyard and divided into a sitting area, a piano area, a dining area with access to the front courtyard, and a kitchen that is almost entirely screened by a dividing wall. The kitchen is comma-shaped and follows the splayed wall that draws into the front door from the outside. The wenge units were put in during the 2001 renovations and have a white stone worktop and upstand, with stainless steel appliances and handles (Fig 4). A games room on the mezzanine level is accessed by a spiral staircase in the tower; the pre-cast terrazzo steps threaded over a steel pole. The mezzanine proved tremendously successful as a family room; years ago small children played there, within earshot but out of sight. It now houses a much-used snooker table. Sloped glazing, facing west and south west, allows natural light to penetrate deep into the house. In the living room a wide fireplace displays a soldier course, a row of vertically placed bricks over its opening. This is a theme that repeats itself subtly in the external brickwork, marking the floor levels in the external walls and under the capping. The flooring is maple in the hall, Welsh terracotta tiles in the kitchen, dining areas and courtyard, and the same carpet throughout the rest of the house. The carpet, which appears as plain blue, was designed with Navan Carpets with an unobtrusive mottling so that it doesn’t show the dirt. The white internal brick walls are ideal for displaying art, of which the family has a fine collection. It was their intention that the living room in particular should house art from many different eras. Two alcoves in the curved wall of the tower house sculptures by John Behan and Geoffrey Thornton, there is a Felim Egan painting over the fireplace, a portrait of Brendan Behan by Liam O Neill to one side, and a pair of Richard Gorman paintings on the panelled wall.

The bedrooms are arranged around an east facing courtyard to the rear and benefit from the morning sun. The original house had four bedrooms on ground level, but the recent extension removed the smallest of these, allowing for a double-height hall that is in itself an example of the architectural sculpture that can be achieved in an interior. It does not present as a complex or confusing space, but once you start to look at it in detail the juxtaposition of spaces, planes, and angles is quite dazzling. That the space is divided into so many different areas makes it an effective gallery for art of many different mediums: stained glass, plasterwork, batik, oil painting, and sculpture in bronze and marble. The renovations created an upstairs living room and a master bedroom which contains the only plastered wall in the house, painted bright red and instantly understandable as a feature in its own right. The wall is curved, both for aesthetic reasons and to allow for a large en suite bathroom of white Carrara marble with lovely loose streaks which reflects the white that predominates in the rest of the house. The adjoining dressing room is a practical alternative to the ubiquitous wardrobe, an arrangement that works so well that Crowley has used it in many other house designs. The master bedroom has a wonderful view up Dalkey Quarry to the coastguard station. The sea lies just out of sight and, if David Crowley had any further plans for the house, they might include a ‘widow’s watch’, a structure inspired by the little decks built on the rooftops of houses in Nantucket so that the wives of fishermen could look out to sea for the return of their husbands. This would involve building on the roof and would be fraught with planning considerations but, says Crowley: ‘If I could ever get planning permission, you would be able to see the sea from there…’

Eleanor Flegg writes regularly for some of Ireland’s leading interiors and
gardening magazines.