The interior of joinery company director Patrick McKenna’s D8 house is informed by ideas from the Far East

Patrick McKenna grew up in Chicago. He met Irish woman Aideen and they now live in Dublin 8 with their one-year-old son Conn (named after Patrick’s great-grandfather Cornelius McKenna who emigrated to New York in 1865). Patrick runs a company called Wabi-Sabi that designs and makes interior joinery from kitchens and built-in furniture, to doors and stairs (www.wabi-sabi.ie).

When did you buy the house and what attracted you to it?

We bought it in 2004. The neighbourhood was key. We wanted to live close to town and be able to walk there. I like these two-up two-down older houses and I knew that I could convert a small space and make the most out of it although bambino wasn’t part of the picture at that stage.

There were not a lot of original features to keep because other people had been at it for 100 years, doing up the house in various stages.

The main thing for me was to maximise the living space while not totally eradicating the nature of what this house was. We have redone the stairs but they are in the same place as they were.

We could have taken out the fireplace to square off the living/diningroom but that would have had cost implications and it also didn’t seem necessary.

We knocked down the lean-to kitchen and built outward at the back and put a bathroom on top of the new kitchen. There were two rooms at the front of the house which we reinstated into one and we converted the attic into an office/guest bedroom with en suite.

Did you stay in the house while work was being done?

No, we lived in an apartment. It would have been impossible because it is such a small space. The building work took the bulk of a year, including the building works and then the internal finishing. I did a lot of that.

How did you go about designing this room?

We have done the sort of thing I do for clients which is to convert their space to make it more holistic: having common joinery and details throughout this room helps to understate the kitchen. I wanted to feel like I was walking into a living space and not a kitchen. The most important thing was to have a space where we could cook and entertain friends.

l like this back-of-house living with a lot of light coming in and the integration with the garden. Natural light was important for every room because otherwise you get dead spaces.

The idea was also to create a quiet space without lots of objects coming in on us. In this space I asked, what are my personal needs and what do we really want to keep? You should not let design be dictated by the fact you have loads of stuff. We have kept stuff to a minimum: we moved from a one-bed apartment so we were laughing with the amount of space and now the house has been stress-tested by a baby. The cupboards by the kitchen are for Conn’s toys – it gives him room in this house but it also lets us tidy it up to have adult space.

I like calm. I am a Buddhist and learned a lot from going to talks by Bob Thurman, who was the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan monk by the Dalai Lama, and incidentally, is the father of Uma Thurman. I also follow a Japanese design concept called Wabi-sabi which is what my company is called.

Where did your design ethos come from?

I did Japanese and international studies at university and my first job was exporting American-style two-by-four flat-pack housing to Kobe in Japan.

I learned a lot from being in Japan. It was just after the Kobe earthquake and they had noticed that the imported housing was still standing because it was a little more flexible. The high-end traditional Japanese houses made by artisan joiners, doing mortise and tenon joints, fell. So we went over and built this American-style housing with a Japanese crew, which was funny because here we were teaching these artisans a lower grade of building.

Wabi-sabi is an ancient design concept that ties in with the contemporary mindset about the simplicity of things but where it varies from strict contemporary is that it is also about the nature of material worn over time. A writer called Leonard Koren wrote a book on it in which he described wabi-sabi as a beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.

I’m not making a contemporary house that is devoid of personality. For instance, my dining table is an object that I have had for a few years. It was an old desk that I got from a furniture dealer in Kilkenny and had stripped down. A person has put effort into it and it is a personal piece to me.

Such things are a part of history and are a part of who you are. It’s the same when people wear a raggy old dressing gown, by the time it has got to that state it is perfect to throw on and be comfortable in.

Timber is the quintessential wabi-sabi material. By its very nature it is unique. There are knots in it that you have to work around.

Modernism is primarily expressed in the public domain while wabi-sabi is in the private domain. You do see very strict contemporary styles used in public building but lots of us don’t want to live in homes like that.

In magazines you see a lot of these highly designed houses and, kind of go, do people actually live in those? I know that is a common feeling because I meet people all the time, when I’m designing kitchens for them, who say they like that style but couldn’t live with it.

I have put new contemporary items in this kitchen but have used good materials that will wear with time. You have to balance a contemporary ideal with a wabi-sabi ideal and say, okay, I don’t want timber worktops because they will get too chewed up. So I went with a more durable surface, of stone.

Wabi-sabi sounds as if it ties in with the idea of leaving a trace de la mainthat the Irish engineer Peter Rice, who worked on the Pompidou Centre and Sydney Opera House, spoke of?

Peter Rice is related to my wife! He is the quintessential engineer in terms of architecture. He embraced architecture and coincidentally worked on Kansai international airport in Japan (which is made on an island with pillars underneath).

You worked on this with the architect Jim Lawlor?

Jim is a great guy because he’s well versed with materials. He had redone his own house – physically built it along with a master builder – so he had valuable knowledge on the ground. Jim is a mate and we are still friends which is a good sign!

He came around one weekend and we hammered in the batons on the garden walls using timber off-cuts from a house I was working on – talk about hands’-on service from an architect.