Month: March 2023

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Architecture Design Developers People Town Houses

Mountjoy Square Dublin +

Sureness of Style

“Is there a good house on Mountjoy Square?” Desirée Shortt asks mischievously. She qualifies herself, “It’s a rhetorical question!” She is talking about the condition of the houses, not the architecture. Ireland’s greatest living china restorer lives a safe block away in the genteel North Great George’s Street. Her neighbours include Senator David Norris and Grade I Conservation Architect John O’Connell. “Dublin is a very beautiful city,” Desirée qualifies herself even further. “Edinburgh is the only comparable city.”

It doesn’t help that Mountjoy Square shares its name with a fairly infamous prison. Slowly, though, the four terraces facing the green are shedding their shady past and early signs of gentrification are shining through on a sunny winter’s morning. There’s something more impressive about Georgian Dublin townhouses than their London counterparts. The brick is redder, the fanlights wider, the first floor windows taller, the basement areas deeper. It’s all about scale: bigger really is better. Everything’s looking up.

John Heagney writes in The Georgian Squares of Dublin, 2006, “Developed by the Gardiner Estate, Mountjoy Square was laid out in 1791 and built between 1793 and 1818. It has the distinction of being Georgian Dublin’s only true square since each of its four sides measures 140 metres in length. Mountjoy Square earned this tribute from contemporary commentators Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh: ‘This square, which is now completely finished, is neat, simple and elegant, its situation elevated and healthy … the elevation of the houses, the breadth of the streets, so harmonise together, as to give pleasure to the eye of the spectator, and add to the neatness, simplicity, and regularity everywhere visible, entitling the square to rank high among the finest in Europe.’”

He continues, “But perhaps more than Dublin’s other Georgian squares, Mountjoy Square has suffered the depredations of time: after the 1800 Act of Union, it went into decline and many of its fine buildings became tenement dwellings, while a period of protracted neglect during the 20th century led to extensive loss of houses on the west and south sides of the square. The survival of the north and east sides is due largely to the heroic determination of individuals and families who pledged themselves to its continued existence and have laid the foundations for the future renaissance of Mountjoy Square, while a renewed interest in rescuing and cherishing Georgian Dublin bodes well for the future of this important part of the city’s streetscape.”

A driver’s experience is of a cohesive set piece of urban planning and architecture. A streetwalker’s experience is of the finer grain. Cut granite flags, moulded granite paving plinths, cut stone half arches spanning basement areas, cast iron boot scrapers and lantern standards. And those fanlight doorcases with their leaded umbrella like-spokes, miniature glass lanterns, sidelights, columns and friezes. The typical three bay five storey house on Mountjoy Square has 590 square metres of floorspace. Size matters.

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Dover Castle Kent +

Well Kept

For the guts of a millennium, Dover Castle has dominated the Calais-facing Kent coastline. The Normans erected a castle at Dover soon after William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings in the neighbouring county of East Sussex. But it was Henry II, the first of the ruling Plantagenets, who built the Great Tower of Dover Castle in the latter half of the 12th century. This keep stands 25 metres tall with corner towers rising a further 3.7 metres. The walls are up to 6.5 metres thick. Strips of white Caen stone contrast with grey Kentish ragstone to create a striking visual effect. A precursor to Arts and Crafts architecture no doubt. Stripy architecture like Richard Norman Shaw’s 1880s New Scotland Yard building on Victoria Embankment in London would follow. In 2009 the Great Tower was given the full English Heritage treatment. The King’s Hall, The King’s Chamber and other rooms were decorated to suggest the royal and his court are still in residence but have popped out for full English breakfast.

The castle is a vast compound of organic architectural growth down the ages. Two concentric rings of defence – an inner and an outer bailey – are dotted with gatehouses and towers. A ruinous Roman lighthouse and a restored Anglo Saxon church on Castle Hill are some of the oldest structures on the site. One of the last additions to the built form is the Officers’ Quarters and Mess overlooking a cliffside modern carpark. This two and three storey range, faced with polygonal rubble and limestone dressings, was built to the design of Anthony Salvin in the 1850s. The architect was an expert in medieval buildings; he specialised in restoring country houses and churches. His work at the castle is in the Tudor Gothic Revival vein with appropriately detailed battlements. The patina of age ensures the various styles of architecture at Dover Castle don’t jar but harmoniously sit cheek by jowl, keep by lodge.

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Architects Architecture Design Luxury Restaurants

The Atrium + The Westin Hotel Dublin

Gotta Lovett

The opening years of the 21st century were prime time for Dublin. A flurry of new five star hotel arrivals welcomed rich locals and richer tourists. Converted out of a cluster of 11 buildings including a banking hall on a prominent city centre corner overlooking Trinity College, The Westin Hotel opened in 2001. Henry J Lyons were the architects for the conversion. The Atrium is a new space hollowed out of the built form, rising six storeys to a glazed roof. Internal bedroom windows look down onto a lounge area. Fun columns – never to be mistaken for Sir Edward Lovett Pierce’s work – support first floor bedroom balconies. There’s an even more fun Bossi style chimneypiece. There are lots of books for fireside reading (The Glass Lake by Maeve Binchy, Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Modern Materialism and Emergent Revolution by William McDougall and so on).

“Too many repro paintings,” critiqued Damian O’Brien, Marketing Director of the Irish Tourist Board, referring to the interior. Fortunately, the non original art in The Atrium has been replaced by panels of hand painted Chinese wallpaper. If you want your very own Bossi chimneypiece (named after Pietro Bossi, an Italian craftsman who worked in Dublin for the last two decades of the 18th century and developed a very distinctive colourful style), M+D Lewis Antiques on King’s Road in London are selling a fine example for £545,000.

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Architects Architecture Country Houses Design Developers People

Camden Park Road + Yester Park Chislehurst Kent

Roll Over Country Life

Long time resident and Secretary of the Chislehurst Residents’ Association from 1966 to 1974, Mary Holt was committed to the architectural research of her local area. In 1991 her definitive study of Chislehurst Conservation Area was published. Two of the most beautiful gated roads in this leafy location are Camden Park Road and Yester Park, both lined with villas designed to induce envy. The former borders Chislehurst Golf Club while the latter forks away to straddle a ridge. This is outer suburbia at its finest.

Mary’s introduction states, “Indeed Chislehurst grew up as a scattered village centred around its various commons, surrounded by large country estates, and did not outgrow its hilltop site until mid Victorian times. After the construction of the railway in 1865, however, it became a fashionable suburb for London businessmen, while in 1870 the French Imperial Court took up residence in exile at Camden Place. Sadly, World War II left its mark on Chislehurst: a surprising number of Victorian buildings and earlier properties were destroyed or damaged by bombs, thus providing the opportunity for more intensive development.”

She comments, “The special character of Camden Park Road lies in the contrast between the undeveloped park-like nature of the golf course to the north and the largely built up backcloth of substantial houses to the south. The road is developed for the major part of its length with substantial detached houses, but on the northern side of the road frontage development stops at No.23. The edge of the golf course is well treed, giving this part of the road a very rural appearance although the housing development continues on the other side of the road. The road has an attractive character of a high class residential area in which the landscaping forms a prominent and important part of the street scene.”

In the part of Camden Park Road closest to the golf course which was developed first, “Most of the houses here, in the Arts and Crafts style, were built by William Willett Junior who purchased Camden Place in 1890; the architect for several was Ernest Newton, working in conjunction with Amos Faulkner, and reveal the wide range of Newton’s talent.” The Arts and Crafts architect Ernest Newton was a protégé of Richard Norman Shaw. He excelled at residential architecture of ‘near-symmetry’ where the massing is balanced but a window or chimney stack or some other feature will be placed off-centre.

The Architectural Outsiders, a 1984 publication edited by Roderick Brown, includes Ernest Newton. The editor explains it is a study of “outsiders in the sense of being outside the body of designers who have been adequately studied”. Richard Morrice writes the chapter on Ernest Newton, discussing many of his suburban and country houses although Chislehurst isn’t mentioned. He states that the architect’s domestic work demonstrated “the ultimate interchangeability of vernacular and neo Georgian, almost reducing thereby the question of style to irrelevance”.

And on the elevated road: “Yester Park leads off to the west from the upper end of Yester Road through a brick and wrought iron gateway, flanked on one side by Walden Lodge which dates from about 1850. It is a small tree-lined road of interwar years development with large houses, some in contrasting styles on the lower side of the road, set in mature landscaped gardens. The house on the upper side are more uniform, mock Tudor in character with generally open plan front gardens.”

Chislehurst Conservation Area illustrates how the architecture of prominent late 19th century architects like George Devey, Richard Norman Shaw and Philip Webb flowed into the rising industry of premium housebuilding. If there is a common detail that ties most of the half century or so of houses together, it would be black and white Tudor style half-timber boarding.