For her Georgian Dublin 6 home, this interior design architect prioritised its most beautiful rooms for everyday use
On a quiet Georgian square, interior design architect Pia Casal has created a warm and inviting family home, through a thoughtful layout combined with art and furniture collected over many years and countries.
Afternoon rays stream through the wavy window panes of Pia Casal’s Dublin 6 home, as a steady stream of “thuck” noises puncture the air from a nearby tennis court. It’s unusual to be standing in a modern kitchen in the old part of a Georgian house; most people add an extension to the back of these buildings and do the majority of their living there. Not Pia, who moved to Ireland from Paris the week of the first lockdown, following her now-husband Matthieu.
Renting nearby and liking the area, they soon began to house hunt for something more permanent. This was the first house they visited, and the only one Pia saw in person. “I loved the potential as soon as we went through the door. The scale of the house was ideal for us. We started looking under the carpets, and the floors on the ground floor were in good condition. The fact that no work had been done on it for more than 50 years was also a plus.”
As they waited for the keys to come through, the couple spent evenings walking around the neighbourhood, stealing glimpses of how others had adapted their homes for modern living. Almost everyone had the kitchen to the rear of the house, except one. The placement of this kitchen and its central table is both sociable and practical. “In Paris, people host. I was keen to be able to cook and talk.”
The couple kept everything original that they could, including the hand-blown glass windows, shutters, internal doors, picture rails, cornicing, floors, door saddles, baseboards, plus the entrance door and its hardware.
Pia’s vision for the house was to create a family home, where main living spaces interact, without taking away privacy and character from each other. As such, the kitchen and living room can be open-plan, or closed off behind partition doors, and there is a garden-facing study to the rear, whose bifold doors open fully onto an outdoor patio. The ground floor is a series of interconnected rooms that flow together but also work as independent spaces. The scale of these rooms feels true to the spirit of the original house.
Pia explains her logic: “We decided to make it as flexible as we could, reducing the built-ins to only storage and cupboard units, thinking that in time spaces might evolve. For example, the study in the extension might one day become an office or a dining room. I wanted to bring light into the house and to be able to see from the back garden to the street. The circulation was also important.” You can access the basement level, with its barbecue and seating area, via steps from the ground-level patio.
It’s on a stone wall out here that you can see traces of the former basement level, which was dug up to give a more comfortable ceiling height, and this meant underpinning the house. Though Pia is a qualified architect, she enlisted the help of Alan O’Connell at OC Architects & Design as they are conservation specialists. A lot of digging was required to create the two-tier garden level and basement ceiling height. Over twelve weeks, on average two skips of soil were removed daily by the project contractors Fordlin Construction. Now with pristine walls painted with Tusk and Shallows by Little Greene and Farrow & Ball Wimborne White, it’s difficult to picture all that mess.
This neutral backdrop allows the couple’s art and personal pieces to breathe. “Everybody has objects they like or that have special value to them,” Pia says. “Subtle shades of white allow these objects to exist.” Though a new renovation, the house feels very homely and lived-in. This can be partly credited to the fact that much of its furniture came from Pia’s 47-square-metre rented Paris apartment.
“Every piece I bought for that apartment I bought thinking that I would keep it forever – no matter the origin, from vintage Ikea chaise lounges to 1960s armchairs. Once we bought the house and started working on the drawings, we immediately started working on sourcing the pieces that we were missing.” These were the kitchen table and chairs, the living room sofa and table, and a modular sofa in the garden study.
Working with second-hand furniture is important to Pia. “I believe that a mixture of old and new helps us achieve character – a little scratch on a leg of an antique sofa, some little imperfections that give the object character and make us feel at ease using them.”
The home is designed to be flexible, and Pia says it’s hard to know how their home will change – “who knows what life will bring?”. But for now, the expecting couple are busy adapting a guest room upstairs to become a baby’s room, and readying for summer visits from loved ones, who are hosted in a self-contained basement suite. “I like the independence we created in this house. One can be in the study reading, while someone in the kitchen is cooking, and someone else downstairs watching a film. It is a great place to receive friends and family visiting from abroad, but with the basement suite, it’s hard to get them to leave,” she laughs.
Currently wrapping up projects in France, Pia is turning her focus to Ireland-based ones. “Ireland has lots of beautiful houses that have not been touched for years. It’s exciting to bring back the former glory of these spaces,” she says. “I’m also looking forward to finding vintage Irish pieces to integrate in projects, and working with Irish craftspeople.”
Photography: Ruth Maria Murphy
This feature originally appeared in the spring/summer 2024 issue of IMAGE Interiors. Have you thought about becoming a subscriber? Find out more, and sign up here.
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