Designer party pad with cinema and DJ booth
FRANK McGahon is a fourth-generation architect whose grandfather, TP McGahon, designed the outdoor swimming baths in Blackrock, Co Louth. “I remember swimming there when I was a child,” he says. “In those days Blackrock was a seaside resort and the farmers from Cavan and Monaghan used to come down on their holidays each year on August 15. The water was always freezing.”
These days, Blackrock village has a population of a little over 3,000, and is no longer seen as a resort but rather a suburb of Dundalk. Increasingly, it is also a base for people commuting into Dublin to work via the M1.
McGahon’s grandfather was also responsible for designing the two Art Deco cinemas in Navan. The Lyric, built in 1942, was converted into apartments in the 1990s, with the facade being retained as part of the new design.
The practice that Frank now heads up, McGahon Architects, was founded by his greatgrandfather, John F McGahon, in the early years of the 20th Century.
Less than a mile from the swimming baths, located on one of about 30 sites that were hived off from the grounds of the family home in which he grew up, stands 1 Hamilton Lane, which Frank designed for his own family and built in 2004/5.
The house has 408sqm of living space arranged across three storeys over a basement, and outside there are gardens of 0.3 acres and ample off-street parking for several cars.
“Although I specialise in residential design, it’s tricky designing a house for yourself,” he says.
“It’s more of a moveable feast. I actually got planning permission for two different designs for the site. The house that’s there now was the original design, but when the pricing came back in the early 2000s I thought that it was too high, so I put together another application for a smaller, L-shaped house. I got planning permission for that too, but when the pricing for that came back it was higher than for the larger house, so I went back to the original plan!
“The house has a nice aspect; it’s similar to my old family home. Everyone talks about the ideal orientation being to the south, and it is great for solar gain, but I prefer a south-westerly aspect as you get usable sun in the house throughout the day from mid-morning until evening.”
McGahon says that when he is designing a house, he likes there to be a good expanse of glass at the back, and for the front to be nicely private.
These two rules of thumb inform the design of 1 Hamilton Lane, a distinctive, contemporary house clad in Western Red Cedar.
Features include 3m-high ceilings, a Bose surround-sound system, and solid concrete floors (every architect loves a concrete floor, just ask Dermot Bannon) with underfloor heating. The house has gas-fired central heating and a cosy B3 BER. On the ground floor, the entrance hall leads to the open-plan living/dining/kitchen area, featuring a dramatic opaque red glass kitchen by Scavolini. This space opens out on to a large decked area, and there is a handy guest lavatory.
“The kitchen/dining room looks out over the garden and is very bright, even on a dull day, and gets good sun,” says Frank.
“It’s always warm. I deliberately put the kitchen on just one wall, so that the island is more like a table. It feels more spacious that way.”
In his youth, McGahon used to moonlight as a DJ and the living space features a DJ booth from where he can spin discs for friends and accommodate his collection of vinyl records.
“It’s great for a party,” he says.
The master bedroom suite is on the first floor — it has a walk-in wardrobe and bathroom — and there are three further bedrooms on this level.
One of the bedrooms is en suite, and the other two share a Jack and Jill bathroom that is accessed from both.
Upstairs there’s an observatory that could be used as a fifth bedroom, and a roof terrace that enjoys privacy thanks to a parapet wall; there are views of the sea and the Cooley Mountains.
Unusually for a contemporary house, there is a large basement. “It happened almost by accident,” says McGahon, “as a consequence of the sloped nature of the site. We only really decided to do it during construction. It has given us plenty of storage space, and we have used the rest of it as a cinema room so we installed a projector. It has block walls that keeps the sound in and the kids have got great value from it.”
McGahon is now ready to downsize, and hopes that his next project will be to build another, smaller house in the area when he moves on from Hamilton Lane.