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Heritage Buildings
Reuse Reinvent
Heritage into Inspiration
The buildings we inherit are the largest cultural artefacts we possess as a society and the only ones we live our lives inside. They have a profound influence on our daily lives and our sense of ourselves.
From the monumental to the entirely ordinary: cathedrals, castles, palaces and the great civic museums at one end to more ‘ordinary’ houses, mills and farm sheds at the other they carry value and meaning from the past not our present and future, as evidence of how people built, worked and lived; as craft and material quality that is now rare and difficult to reproduce and of course as receptors and host for new uses and purposes. And critically they have paid their carbon debt usually many times over.
At solearth we draw a line from The Venice Charter of 1964, which framed heritage structures as "place" and made cultural significance the thing to be conserved t o to ICOMOS's Burra Charter of 1979 to our present focus on conservation for sustainability and embodied carbon reasons while trying to create beautiful project along the way.
We draw inspiration from the wonderful projects of recent decades that transform glorious old structures into new uses keep them available and maintained for present and future generations; Castelvecchio , Musée d'Orsay, Tate Modern and Ireland IMMA at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and the more recent Butler Gallery, which moved there in 2020 from the basement of Kilkenny Castle.
Why - Conserving and Adapting
An existing building has already invested in its most expensive elements; foundations, walls, roof, floors, Those costs were met once, in money, in materials and in carbon. Building their new equivalent rather than adapting them is expensive, environmentally costly, and labour-hungry. We treat them as places, as delight as assets, not obstacles. Our work honours and protects them while meeting the needs of a new generation. and
For us, conservation and reuse are not a specialist sideline. They are the default position. The goal is a building that is genuinely warm, dry, healthy, safe and useful and still recognisably itself.
How we work with an existing building
We read the building before we draw anything. Every old structure carries a record of how it was built, what has been done to it since, and where it is currently failing. Survey and diagnosis come first: fabric, structure, moisture, orientation, daylight, previous interventions, and the specific character that gives the building its value. Only then does design begin.
We treat the building as an ecosystem. All buildings — but especially old ones — are a dynamic interaction of heat, light, air, moisture and microorganisms. Any project adjusts that existing balance. Doing so without knowledge is how damage happens. The research is consistent on this point: maximising one performance metric at the expense of a balanced approach across the others simply moves the problem somewhere else in the structure, usually somewhere you cannot see.
We upgrade with materials the building can live with. Many of the materials and strategies that are appropriate for safely improving old fabric — lime, natural insulations, breathable build-ups, vapour-open detailing — are the same ones used in natural and ecological construction. We have decades of experience specifying and detailing them.
We work with the statutory framework rather than fight it. Protected structures are rightly defended by strong legislation, and that legislation brings procedural and technical demands with it. Approached methodically and early — with the conservation officer, the planner and the building control officer in the conversation from the outset rather than at the end — those demands become a design brief rather than an obstacle.
We let new work be new. Old fabric is usually robust enough that unusual contrasts and harmonies can emerge from mixing old and new. We do not counterfeit period detail. New interventions are legible as new, sympathetic in form, proportion and material, and reversible where they should be.
We design for the building's second life, not just its restoration. A conserved building that nobody can afford to run, or that no viable use fits, is a building on its way back to dereliction. Use, comfort, running cost and compliance are part of the conservation strategy from day one.
The real challenges — and how we handle them
Thermal upgrade without loss of heritage value. This is the central difficulty in the reuse of old buildings, and the one that most often goes wrong. Insulating and sealing an old wall changes how it handles moisture. Get the balance wrong and you get interstitial condensation, decay in embedded timbers, and mould — often invisible for years. We design the whole moisture and air path, not just the U-value, and we accept a slightly lower headline performance figure where chasing the last increment would put the fabric at risk.
Vital Signs
In use, heritage buildings have specific technical challenges to maintaining their internal health. Typically built without modern damp and cold prevention (in our climates), they need careful understanding and monitoring of their vital signs often in real time. Temperature, humidity, moisture content (of wooden and organic elements), structural movement and chemical reaction can all occur. Modern instrumentation coupled with remote dashboard technologie can address these difficulties and ensure old structures put to modern uses can thrive.
Regulatory parity between old and new. In most jurisdictions a new apartment must meet the same energy and safety standards whether it is a new build or a retrofit inside a 200-year-old shell. That single fact stalls a great many upper-floor and above-the-shop conversions. Resolving it takes early engagement, evidence, and a willingness to argue a case for the specific building rather than assume a standard answer.
Fire safety and escape. Compartmentation, egress and suppression are genuinely difficult to introduce into existing structures, particularly in narrow urban plots where the optimum apartment layout wants to run horizontally across a boundary that runs vertically. Modern detection and suppression, and a properly argued fire strategy, can often achieve the required level of safety by a different route than the standard one.
Consent and process. Protected structure consent, Section 5 declarations, conservation method statements, impact assessment and the associated documentation are a workload in themselves. Knowing what will be asked for, and having it ready, is most of the battle.
Cost.
Old buildings hold surprises, and a contingency is not optional. But the honest comparison is against the full cost of the new-build alternative — including the site, the demolition, the services and the carbon — not against a best-case new build on a clear site.
Selected Projects
Airfield Estate. Dublin.
The former home of Letitia and Naomi Overend, a 42-acre working farm and garden estate in Dublin's southern suburbs. We led the multidisciplinary design team on an €11 million transformation into one of Ireland's best-loved visitor destinations. The work combined conservation to strengthen the architectural character of the existing building stock with new low-carbon structures, a new entrance pavilion, waterside restaurant, education facilities and farmyard complex.
A central move was to take pressure off the historic house by relocating the café to a new pavilion, freeing the house for restoration and for display of the Overend archive; another re-established the historic building line and spatial rhythm at The Hive. Winner, Best Cultural Project and Best Sustainable Project, Irish Architecture Awards 2014; Green Building Award 2014. Dundrum, Dublin (completed 2014)
Inis Cealtra (Holy Island) Visitor Management and Sustainable Tourism Development Plan
In October 2015 Clare County Council appointed us to lead the specialist team preparing the visitor management and sustainable tourism plan for Inis Cealtra, with Brian O'Brien as lead architect. The island is one of the most significant ecclesiastical sites in the country — a monastic settlement from the sixth and seventh centuries, with six churches, a round tower, a monastic cell and burial ground, and associations with Brian Ború — sitting some 300 metres off the western shore of Lough Derg near Mountshannon. The Council's purchase of 41 acres in June 2015, alongside the two acres already held by the OPW, had brought the whole island into public ownership for the first time, and the plan had to answer the question that followed: how to open a fragile, uninhabited, boat-access-only archaeological landscape to more visitors without damaging the thing they come for.
The brief covered access to the island, visitor facilities on or near it, and its promotion as a destination, while establishing its historical significance and protecting both built and natural heritage. This is conservation practised at the scale of a whole place rather than a single building, and it is largely a question of carrying capacity, arrival sequence and where the pressure is allowed to land — which in this case meant locating the substantive visitor infrastructure on the mainland and keeping intervention on the island itself light. We began with public meetings in Mountshannon to draw on the knowledge of people who know the island far better than any consultant will, and ran an open consultation process through 2016 before presenting the finalised plan in July 2017.
Clare County Council has since taken the project forward as the Inis Cealtra Visitor Experience, with a visitor and interpretative centre created in the Old Rectory, a protected structure in Mountshannon village. Lough Derg, Co. Clare (2015–2017).
Castle Espie Wetland Centre
A €3.5 million reorganisation of the visitor facilities on an estate of existing buildings undergoing ecological restoration for the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust. Rather than clear the site, a new linear Long Hall was woven between the retained structures, replacing an awkward shed and connecting what remained, holding the domestic scale of the old courtyards to the south while rising to address the lough to the north. The derelict limekiln was conserved with minimal intervention — pots cleared, stonework repaired using the fallen stone found around it — and a light glazed observatory pavilion set adjacent to it, deliberately contrasting in material but sympathetic in form and proportion. A new crannóg was built by traditional means: stone base, oak posts, wattle and daub with hemp insulation, thatched roof, limewash. RSUA Sustainable Building of the Year 2010; RSUA Best Medium Budget Building 2010; NIEA Best Sustainable Building 2010. Strangford Lough, Co. Down (2009- 2014)
Three Into Two.
An 1880 end-of-terrace house with partially protected external fabric, converted from a standard two-storey, two-bedroom dwelling into a three-storey, three-bedroom home. The approach was to swell the internal volume out against the existing skin and insert a new inner skin carrying insulation and services in the zone between, leaving the historic street elevation intact while transforming performance and spatial complexity within. Widely published as a demonstration of what deep upgrade can achieve in a small protected inner-city house. The Liberties, Dublin 8 (2006)
ECOttage Enlargement and refurbishment of a historic cottage on the Record of Protected Structures. The design worked inside a hard constraint - a height limit set by the existing cottage above, a shared sewer below - using the falling section of the garden to create a new sequence of spaces from front to back, reorienting the house toward the sun and opening it to the garden. Highly insulated airtight timber frame, reused, natural and recyclable materials, organic finishes, solar thermal working with biomass. Dublin 14 (2008)
House Reduction An Edwardian redbrick semi-detached house where a ground-floor bedroom had cut the kitchen off from the garden. The design removed accommodation rather than adding it: the bedroom and part of two kitchen walls came out to create a light-filled room that merges into an enlarged garden. The load-bearing corner carrying two storeys above was made to disappear into the depth of the roof and ceiling, allowing three configurations of glazed corner. Thermally insulating clay block with lime render, salvaged timber internally, solar thermal. Selected for exhibition, RIAI Awards 2008. Rathgar, Dublin 6 (2006)
The Daintree Building Not a pure conservation project, but an illustration of how new work can be made to belong in an old quarter. A holistic mixed-use building of apartments, offices, craft space and café on a tight backland site off Camden Street, scaled and grained to the changing backland character of that part of the city, in lime render, timber and copper. Ireland's first multi-storey timber-frame mixed-use city-centre building, and called Ireland's most sustainable apartment building. RIAI Architecture Awards 2006 (selected for exhibition); SEAI Sustainable Energy Awards 2005, Building Design Award. Dublin 8 (2005)
Specially designed for a site where the sun and view were in opposite directions.
Combining natural affordable materials with lots of daylight, the split level makes for an uplifting harmonious home. Day and night areas are separated and a seamless connection to the outside is created.
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