slab foundations, triple-glazed windows, airtightness, and a highly angled design and orientation that seeks to maximise solar gain. But while it turns out that a high BER rating was achievable for the whole building, striving for passive house certification would have made no sense because of the physical marriage between a modern high-performance extension envelope and an old-style, solid masonry, minimally insulated structure with traditional sash windows and a four-storey construction that is just one room deep, resulting in all the main rooms having three or four external walls (meaning there is a high surface-to-volume area from which heat can escape). Architect Bill Maxwell of Enniskillen-based Maxwell Pierce has worked on plenty of historic buildings with extensions, but making such dwellings work as single, seamless entities from an energy and comfort point of view can be difficult — unless you also have the opportunity to strip the older building back to its bare bones and start again from scratch, as was the case here. If this is not possible, he actively discourages adding modern extensions to historic buildings because of the propensity of the older buildings to devour heat. If the homeowners cannot make serious improvements to insulation and airtightness in the original building, they will have to continue spending huge amounts just to keep the temperature of the old, leaky house somewhere near that of the new, well-insulated extension.
any kind remain in the county. When Patrick and Anne Jordan first spotted the house in 2009 (the couple and their five children were living just a few hundred yards away), it was in a bit of a mess, having been abandoned by its elderly owner a few years previously, and subsequently subjected to a period of continuous vandalism by students from a nearby secondary school before the windows were blocked up and the property made reasonably secure. The couple bought the house and sat on it for a while before investigating the possibility of renovating it and adding a glassy extension. The house already had an ugly rear extension made out of pre-cast concrete that was grafted on in the 1920s, providing a plumbed toilet, kitchen and utility. To this end, they consulted with a number of different architects, including one who had close links to Kildare County Council, and who persuaded them that the original structure was definitely worth preserving. But when they went to hire her services, she was all booked up — much to their disappointment. So they decided to knock the whole edifice down in favour of a new house of similar character. “When we did that, Kildare County Council pounced and put a preservation order on it, despite there being no historical reference to or record of the building anywhere,” said Anne Jordan.
Although the couple conceded to KCC’s demand that they go back to their original plan to preserve and extend, Anne doesn’t hide her exasperation at the exacting and sometimes tedious demands of the building conservation procedure that followed, which included continuous consultations with the local authority as the project rolled along. “We were told this house had to be tended to carefully, and that it needed a grade one architect, which is a load of whallop because it’s just a farmhouse, it’s not government buildings…Conservation is important, but we were trying to embrace new ways as well,” she added. Sunni Goodson — an architectural conservation specialist with grade one architects Mesh — was appointed to be the main intermediary between the Jordans and the council. She readily concedes that the house is not a protected structure and that much of its historic fabric had been compromised, but says it was “still just a gem of a house”. “The vaulted brick ceiling at basement level and a portion of the original staircase survived, as well as floor structures, chimney breasts and the 19th century front porch,” she said. Before Kildare County Council intervened, the Jordans had hired Bill Maxwell to oversee a new build project, but his historic building experience would make him an even better choice when it became clear that a complete
“The wee pieces that we have added on as extensions umpteen times for listed buildings don’t have any huge positive impact on the overall property. The difference with the Jordans was that the extension became so much part and parcel of the house and we didn’t want to have that division between the old bit and the new bit.” But what added a further difficulty to the deep retrofit of this particular near-300 year-old building was the zeal with which Kildare County Council required homeowners Patrick and Anne Jordan to preserve as far as possible its essential character and salvageable features. It turns out the local authority is more active in this regard compared with many others around the country, because so few historic buildings of
(above) The house is ventilated via Lunos decentralised mechanical ventilation systems with heat recovery.