BUILDING PLOT
Simon Chamberlayne used all of his considerable skills as a builder to convert a derelict terraced cottage for his family, says Mary O’sullivan, and did much of the back-breaking work by hand. photography by Tony Gavin
‘The house is a machine for living in” is an oft-repeated quote of legendary architect Le Corbusier and it’s one Simon Chamberlayne heartily agrees with. For him it’s all-important that the house should work for those inhabiting it and that everything in it should run smoothly. The pretty terraced-cottagestyle house in south Co Dublin which he shares with his wife, Aoife, and their baby, Lucy, reflects that attitude. “I get very agitated if things don’t work properly,” he notes. “Why bother pissing someone off with an invention that doesn’t work?”
Of course, it follows that he’s also obsessed with tidiness, so it will come as quite a surprise to those who’ve had renovations done in recent years that Simon is a builder; valuable and all as builders are to us, they are not particularly known for their tidiness — who hasn’t had to remove bags of rubble they’ve left behind or even chase them to come and take away their own forgotten tools?
But Simon is not your typical builder — he’s young, he’s dynamic, he’s well travelled and, unlike most tradespeople, who generally come from long lines of fathers and grandfathers in the same business, he’s actually from a farm near Athboy, Co Meath. “I’m the youngest of four; the farm is all tillage and sheep. It’s only an hour from Dublin, so I’m still involved at weekends. We go there a lot. It’s great to get a bit of the countryside.”
After the genial Simon finished school, he trained to become an electrician and worked for four years before going off to Australia for a year in 1999. He knew he wasn’t going away permanently — after all, he had already met the love of his life, Aoife, while working part-time in her family’s pub in Kells during his apprenticeship days. “I started there in ’95. We started going out in ’98. She was 18, I was 22 — the romance blossomed,” he recalls with a smile.
While Aoife went on to college to study European business and languages, Simon worked both here and in New York. Once Aoife qualified they arranged to meet up in Australia, got a camper van and travelled around Oz. It was after they both arrived back from their travels in 2003 that he got involved in building, when he was offered a job renovating a house in Churchtown. “When you come from a farming background, you learn to do everything — build walls, put on roofs — you’re always fixing something. I took that job and I thought it was a once-off. I had no intention of staying in Dublin, but we’ve been here since,” he explains.
“I project-manage. I didn’t, initially — I did the labouring myself. I started out very much hands-on.” However, as with
‘I remember my friend in the old kitchen saying, “Jeez, this floor is a bit rotten” — before he went straight down through it’
everything during the mid Noughties, his business grew. “I had 22 guys at one stage, but I’m down to five,” he explains.
Operating under the name Sicon Construction, Simon says it’s been mainly by word of mouth. “There’s a group of families — I seem to be permanently doing something for one or other of them,” he notes happily. He also has one client who has a chain of shops who, again, has a steady stream of requirements and for whom Simon is delighted to do shopfitting and maintenance. He also finds himself working for the same architectural practices — indeed one of these, Gillian Murphy, of Murphy Austin, designed his and Aoife’s home, which they bought in 2008.
“This terrace dates from the Forties. The house had belonged to an old lady, the housekeeper of a writer. She had moved to a home four or five years before, so by the time it was put up for sale, it was quite derelict; quite grim,” Simon says.
The location, near the sea and south Co Dublin’s nicest villages, including Glasthule and Sandycove, attracted them and, of course, Simon knew that with Gillian Murphy’s help and his own expertise he could make something of it. But his work was cut out for him. “It was awful. I remember my brother, Roly, standing in the old kitchen and saying, ‘Jeez, this floor is a bit rotten’ and he went straight down through it. There was a burst main underneath it,” Simon says with a laugh. “I worked here for a day a week for 48 weeks with four or five guys and we flattened it, basically, by hand. We had to keep the front the same so everything, apart from the front wall and the walls which are shared, is new. The only room the same as before is the front bedroom.”
The original house had four rooms and comprised 700sq ft. It’s now nearly 1,000sq ft. There are still two small bedrooms — these are to the front of the house; the rest of the space is open-plan, full of light and has higher-than-average ceilings. Clever devices suggested by Gillian, who designed the
renovation, include the inner courtyard.
Wrapping around it are the main bedroom, the kitchen area and the living area. There are doors from both the kitchen and the living room on to the courtyard — according to Simon, they rarely sit in it, but having it there providing extra light and a garden feel is vital. “You can lie in bed and look out at the garden,” he says. In the courtyard is a pair of lovely arched trellises, which add great depth. “Aoife picked them up in Avoca,” Simon notes.
The flooring — marble in the hallway and New England white-oiled oak from Malaysia in the rest of the house — is quite neutral and goes really well with the very subtle paint shades. They are thrilled with the panelling in the living area, another of Gillian’s devices which adds character, yet it’s just painted MDF.
The couple added a lot of colour to the decor by painting the kitchen units in Down Pipe by Farrow & Ball. “They were handpainted by Michael Cox,” says Simon, who adds that the electrical appliances, all Smeg, were bought in the North where they were half the price. “That was in 2008, I don’t know if it’s the same now,” he explains. The whitequartz worktops came from Monaghan and they cleverly used mirrored glass as a splashback. “They’re quite easy to keep,” Simon insists. “A belt of Windolene now and then does the trick”.
The same Down Pipe shade was used to paint the dining table, over which hangs a really strong photograph. “It’s a Cuban smoking a cigar. It was taken by Doug Baxter, Victoria Smurfit’s husband,” Simon explains.
Beyond the dining space is a bright, sunroom-style area, but the part of the house the couple use most is the living area. It is dominated by an L-shaped seating unit which they bought at the French furniture show Maison et Objet — they shipped it home along with their bedroom furniture, which they also bought at the show. Most of the unusual pieces of furniture were picked up by Aoife, who has a good eye.
But Simon did his share, too, including providing the brown and green velvet pouffe. “I was doing a shop fit. A pair of pouffes were going on the skip, so I brought them home,” he says.
So Simon is the perfect builder — he does an excellent job, leaves it tidy and even takes away some of the client’s rubbish.