new build Lough passive house scheme in Rosslare, Co Wexford. Michael Bennett introduced the idea of passive house to the couple. “I had a very open mind to it. It was a term that I’d heard but I didn’t really know what it was,” Pat Cox says. Bennett brought them to see the Rosslare project, and to visit Tomás O’Leary’s passive house in Wicklow, which was the first passive house built in Ireland, back in 2005. Cox says: “And then we decided okay, in principle, let’s go for it.” But aiming for passive house was a leap of faith and a test of patience, because it meant designing a new dwelling from scratch, going back for planning permission, and demolishing the existing house — all of which was going to delay the build by a further six months. Tomás O’Leary’s architectural practice MosArt was charged with designing the new home. Michael Bennett says: “We asked Pat to do something very big, and at times now I shiver a bit. We asked him to redesign his house completely and go back through planning.” Work began on site in July 2013, led by foreman Willie Burke. Knocking one half of two semidetached homes obviously demanded the total trust and faith of the neighbours. “I was thinking, I’ve never done this before with anybody — how’s it going to work?” says project architect Art McCormack of MosArt. “But it worked, because [Bennetts] knew how to do it technically, but also because of the rigour and the procedure on site.” The unusual nature of the site meant that, once the old house was demolished, the next item on the to-do list was the landscaping. The back garden slopes steeply down to Dublin Bay, and there is no access from the back, so the team was able to use the time between the demolition of one house and the construction of the next to bring landscaping equipment in through the front. For Art McCormack, who is both an architect and a landscape architect, the project presented a unique opportunity to design a house and garden together. The challenge, he says, was “to make sure that both were of equal quality”. The back garden now consists of a winding path that descends steeply through a series of a planted terraces to a small gazebo overlooking the bay, making the most of a fairly small space. With the garden finished, the timber frame — built by Wexford-based Shoalwater Timber Frame — arrived on site in October 2013, and the structure was up and weather-proofed by Christmas. The Coxes moved in during April 2014. “So it was an extremely efficient build,” Pat Cox says. The timber frame is insulated with cellulose, plus glass wool in the service cavities. The pitched roof has an additional 80mm of wood fibre insulation over the rafters too, while the flat roofed terrace is insulated completely with glass wool. The windows are Munster Joinery Passiv uPVC units, certified by the Passive House Institute, and manufactured at Munster’s plant at Ballydesmond, Co Cork. Bennetts also used these windows on the Grange Lough project in Rosslare. “We’ve got very comfortable with the product,
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