If you turn this typical 1950s house on the Newport Road in Castlebar around and view it from the side, it has an almost Tardis-like feel to it. Its great design by local architect Aoife Ludden turned what was an old house into an impressive, light-filled four-bedroom home.
Examining the front facade, you will notice the front door space has now been replaced with planting. While it still gets light over what was the front door, internally this space has been turned into a utility room.
Completely upending its original layout, the old part of this property (to the front) now houses four bedrooms – one of which is in use as a home office. Here the main bedroom has a wall of built-in closets and the original diminutive fireplace – now painted white – serves as a reminder that this would have been the only heat source when the property was first constructed.
Also in the old part of this home is a good-sized family bathroom with clean simple lines - a theme that is carried the whole way through this fully renovated detached bungalow.
What is nice about this design – rather than a glazed box to the rear, as is so often the case when period homes are enlarged – is Ludden created a long glazed corridor to connect to a new extension. Of interest is the point where old and new meet, as it’s accented by a curved wall.
The benefit of this new layout is it creates a courtyard-style garden accessible from three points: the corridor connecting old and new, the old house itself and via an entire wall of glazing in the extension.
What it also did was throw an incredible amount of light into the rooms, so they now have a real contemporary feel – completely at odds with its roadside exterior.
To be honest, if you saw interior photographs of this house and you were asked to choose what its facade looked like, it would be unlikely you would pick the correct one, such is the transformation.
It now measures 186sq m (2,007sq ft), almost doubling its original size and the Ber rating has much improved to C1.
Ludden’s extension to the rear of this detached bungalow added 11ft-high ceilings and a neutral palette reflects that sense of space. Warmed by a stove, decor in the open-plan livingroom is simple with pops of colour from a mustard-coloured sofa, which is echoed in a band of yellow on the kitchen wall.
While the extension took the lion’s share of the original garden, leaving a courtyard, the house has easy access to walks and loops at Raheens Wood and the leisure complex at Lough Lannagh.
The property, which is in walk-in condition and is just over a kilometre from Market Square in the centre of Castlebar, is now on the market seeking €495,000 through Sherry FitzGerald Durcan.
