Cycling past her cottage in south Dublin one day, Janie Lazar saw that only the front wall was left. Even the roof had gone. "I thought, oh my word, and the enormity of what I had taken on hit me."

Her well-insulated home, with an open-plan living area downstairs and mezzanine bedroom, is essentially a newbuild. Downsizing from a three-bedroom house with large living space in Dalkey, Lazar wanted to stay in the area where she had socialised and shopped for 20 years. The proximity to the sea was important too.

“Just knowing it’s there and smelling it, even if I can’t see it. I know that in three minutes I can be standing looking out to sea, and within five minutes I can be swimming in the Forty Foot,” she says.

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“It had had work done on it, but I thought ‘I can do something with this space, I can make it a home’,” she says.

Lazar lived in the house for two years – as two planning applications and an appeal went through – and so experienced fully its tiny, icy bathroom and kitchen extensions, facing a yard just big enough to accommodate drains. Heat came from an open fire in the front room that she cosied by adding a wood-burning stove, on which she cooked, heated water for washing, boiled kettles and dried clothes. The central bedroom had just a roof light, so she and some friends drilled a hole in its wall to let in light and heat via the kitchen, “which was good in summer, but, come winter, it added to the extreme drop in temperature”.

When designing the new house, Lazar avoided the temptation to cram as many rooms into it as possible, opting instead for

Diminutive

Despite the diminutive size of the house, she has always been mindful that in 1911, according to the census, seven people lived here: two parents, their three children, and a niece and nephew.

“I played around with the space quite a lot given the constraints of the footprint. It only really offered so many ways of providing accommodation that would comply with building regs,” says Lazar.

While the courtyard could have provided more internal space, she is a keen plantswoman and enjoys the natural light and plethora of plants through much of the year, as well as its sheltered nature.

"This is Ireland, so you have to be realistic: how often do you sit out? In my Dalkey garden, I would be blown to smithereens," she says.

She leaves the tall glazed doors between the livingroom and courtyard open in summer to extend the space and has put a small shelf on the windowsill in the kitchen to balance breakfast on, so she can sit on a high stool and gaze out and breathe in.

A love of terrazzo led her to opt for a polished concrete floor throughout the ground floor, which has a shower room off the courtyard and kitchen.

“There seemed to be very little cost difference between a traditional heating system and underfloor heating, and because the cottage is so well insulated it retains the heat,” she says.

The insulation is hemp and she recalls a friend dropping by when it was rolled up on site and saying, “Nice insulation!”, which she saw as a great compliment.

The floor is like an artwork in itself, says Lazar, something she contributed to by throwing in pebbles she had collected over the years.

After everything else had been done, a Kilsaran truck pulled up at the door and a huge big feeder chute poured in the concrete. At this point, Lazar had her own stones dropped in, not knowing what would emerge when the concrete was ground down and polished. They now shine as large white, brown and black ovals amid the standard black chips in the local aggregate mix.

“They bring it to life,” she says.

Listening to seagulls

The original cottage was on one floor, but with the mezzanine bedroom Lazar can now enjoy lying beneath the pitched roof with the Velux open, listening to seagulls. She left the bedroom open-plan – and managed budgets to have the luxury of a basin and toilet fitted upstairs, all discreetly concealed behind a half wall – and open to the ground floor, via an open staircase, to benefit from rising heat and a greater sense of space.

She bought no new furniture, instead employing pieces that have travelled through life with her, garnered from years of collecting and from one of her former businesses, importing 20th-century classics into Ireland. These sit well beside older pieces, such as a sideboard that came from a London post office when a friend working for the Royal Mail told her the company was getting rid of old furniture. The gathered pieces, from second-hand shops and markets across the world, have resulted in a happenstance retro look.

But there is an urban feel too, with the cottage's concrete floor and the industrial cooker happily bought from a builder in Ballymount after being let down by someone in Ballymena. "Sometimes things really do work out for the best," says Lazar.

She praises her builder, Lucian Anton, of Carrera Construction, and adds: "I enjoyed the whole building process from start to finish and would have no hesitation in doing it again for myself or managing a project for someone else."

And despite that fright of seeing only the front wall standing, she says: “I have absolutely no regrets. It was at a time of great change in my life, and in many ways I saw it as a challenge to prove to myself that I could do it.”

Not only does she feel comfortable about the material structure – with its insulation and underfloor heat – but also about having created a place of her own.

“There was that feeling of satisfaction you get through creation and of feeling settled,” she says. “It meant I could then really focus on where my coaching business was going, which has led to me founding Much More Than Words.” (Her business, at muchmorethanwords.com, helps foreign nationals integrate into the Irish workplace through increased confidence in speaking, presenting and teamwork.)

“It’s funny, that feeling of the sense of calm that comes over you after many years of being in limbo, physically and mentally. Suddenly there was a sense that I could stop, and that slowly I would start to move forward again.”