Many people who move to Dublin for work face a familiar predicament: they must decide whether to settle in the capital city or return home.
Lory Higgins and Sandra Redmond faced this dilemma when their second child was on the way. They were renting in Rathfarnham, while his family’s farmhouse in Monamolin, Rathnure, Co Wexford, sat empty. After he went to Dublin, his elderly father moved in with his sister, who built a new house close by.
“The house went to rack and ruin at that stage,” he recalls.
The farmhouse dates back to the early 1800s, and as a construction engineer, he knew the challenges ahead if they decided to make it their home.
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“Sandra really wanted to keep the house,” he recalls. “I was 50-50 on it. I knew the condition of the house. It was of its time. There was no insulation. You had single-glazed windows and the chimney was about to collapse in on the roof.”
But he also knew that if the house was not rescued, it would become another ruin.
His partner’s determination to save the house won out, and they relocated to Wexford, renting a house while they began planning their family home. She was out running one day when she noticed the restoration of another old farmhouse. That was owned by Joe Fallon, the architectural technologist behind the Dublin and Wexford-based architectural practice Joe Fallon Design.
When they talked to him, they realised that his help could be invaluable.
“The experience Joe had from doing up his own house was crucial,” Higgins says. Fallon drew up the plans and suggested that Higgins also work on the project. They began with the approach to save everything they could save, and to use local materials such as natural slate and stone as much as possible. They managed to save most of the walls and the roof survived. “The original roof timbers are still there,” he says.
Like many homeowners of that era, his father had added a flat-roof extension in the 1960s and they removed that roof. They created a new porch area at the front of the house to make the most of the views of the Wexford countryside from the elevated site. “And we took out some of the internal walls just to make the house work better.”
There had been four bedrooms upstairs but they were small with low ceilings so they reconfigured the space to provide three generously sized rooms. “The only thing we built on was a utility room. We had added an old outbuilding into the house as a playroom/sittingroom for the kids and the utility room is behind that.”
When it comes to the interiors of renovated farmhouses, some people wonder if they should recreate the rooms as they were, but Fallon says this runs the risk of looking inauthentic and fake. Instead, these homeowners have included subtle nods to the heritage of the house.
The Rayburn range in the kitchen and the exposed beams in the kitchen and playroom add a warm and rustic charm to the rooms. But unlike houses of old, there is no one shivering around this range on cold wintry mornings.
“It was a very, very cold house. It was old stone rubble walls and no insulation in the cavity walls in the 1960s extension,” Higgins says. “We did a huge amount of insulation on it, all internal. We insulated the floors as well, and it was rewired and replumbed. It doesn’t take a lot to heat the house now.” The house has a Ber of B2, but “I’d say when we started it was probably E, or F”.
That was 10 years ago and the couple has not regretted their decision to leave Dublin. Higgins says the house has served their growing family very well. They are now a family of five and this latest generation of the Higgins family is fully enmeshed in the local community.
With the teenage years approaching, they recently decided to convert an old garage attached to the house and returned to Joe Fallon Design with a plan for a new master bedroom, a bathroom and large walk-in wardrobe downstairs. And that first chance encounter with Fallon has proved fruitful in other ways. Higgins and Fallon gelled so well that the construction engineer has since worked with Joe Fallon Design on numerous projects.
Looking back on the decision to renovate the house, Higgins says they could have built a new house for the same money, but he’s glad they didn’t. “Taking on these old houses is not easy. Now that it is done and it has worked out so well I am very happy we did renovate it. It will hopefully survive for another couple of generations.”
Fallon says there is a lot of emotion involved in renovating your old family home. “There’s the sentimentality of people being able to use their own homeplace and seeing their children grow up in the fields they grew up in.”
He accepts that many old houses aren’t fit for purpose but says that, with modern steel and technology, they can be adapted and saved. “The vacant homes grants are great to get and there’s a fantastic revival there. We are busier than ever in doing up those old houses. Kildare County Council brought out a great book, Reusing Old Farm Buildings, and we use that as a reference guide.”
His key piece of advice is to get a builder who understands old buildings and how to correctly insulate and ventilate them. “The old way of doing it was a lime render that allowed the walls to breathe and kept out the vapour, but there were no insulation qualities. So if you are doing up these old buildings, you can’t have a nice stone wall inside and outside. You either insulate the outside of the wall and lose the stone look, or insulate on the inside.”
When it came to cutting out the long windows at the front of the house, the builder Chris Gahan of GR8 construction introduced Fallon to a large wall saw that cut though the old random rubble walls with ease, “giving us those great straight lines on the old building without upsetting the integrity of the walls. That was a game changer.”
Biggest gain: “I love sitting on the first floor of the new porch, looking out at the views,” Lory Higgins says. “We live on the side of the Blackstairs mountain range so on a clear day you can see down to the coast.”
Biggest mistake: Not a mistake as such but if we had the funds at the start we would have converted the old garage, but we couldn’t afford it at the time.”
- This house is one of the projects featured in Beyond the Back Garden, a new coffee table book by Joe Fallon. It celebrates 30 years of his architectural practice by showcasing more than 30 projects and offering advice garnered from decades of working on home builds. Proceeds will go to Our Lady’s Hospice, which cared for Fallon’s late father and brother.
