The Irish Times

This period-style house ticked all of the right boxes for two sisters who bought it as a new-build 12 years ago: bedrooms upstairs and, downstairs, a front lounge, diningroom and kitchen to the rear, and a garage to one side. But gradually the shortcomings of the cellular rooms and arrangement of spaces began to be felt. The sisters entertain a lot and the thin kitchen and diningroom, side by side, left little room for a table and guests tended to squeeze into the kitchen with the cook. "We began by thinking we should get a new kitchen carpet," laughs one sister, "then talked about a conservatory and ended up with this extension." An engineer she knew, Gabriel Corcoran, recommended architect Noel Brady of NJBA A+U. "We'd spoken with another architect who asked us what we'd like, but we didn't really know. Noel was full of ideas and he made models and computer images so that we knew what we were getting whereas with the other architect everything appeared to be in the ether."