Forget Colen Campbell: when Jake Moulson found himself attempting to renovate a dilapidated townhouse in Georgian Dublin, he looked to Ziggy Stardust, Kubrick and Tarkovsky for reference.
And with that, the London-based architect has created a cohesive and elegant ode to the pop, sometimes campy language of sci-fi. It’s definitely weird – but as a refreshing antithesis to the more muted residential spaces we often see, we definitely love it.
The five-storey townhouse, christened D2, is surrounded by offices and car parks. Unlike its neighbours, this dwelling had a lush garden, which made it an attractive subject for a renovation, despite its dire state and its previous use as a workspace.
Moulson’s first step was to redistribute the light inside the house, to create a series of microspaces. There are inhabitable bays, viewing platforms, light boxes, light-capturing devices and reflective surfaces that basically frame the sky. ‘And then you have the building’s formal front melting into the garden and rear, a chapel used for the family’s art collection and a geological sci-fi kitchen,’ explained the architect when speaking of the CGI-like choices.
And the interior elements were all bespoke, from the wall cuts to the furniture. That includes a laser-etched steel floor, a kitchen curtain in (what else) thermoformed Corian, the watchtower structure in the main bathroom and an onyx-lit under-the-stairs toilet.
‘I see this project as a disorientating and seductive compression piece, mixing dialogues between art, architecture, design, science and fictions, from the intimate to the flamboyant,’ he explained.
Flamboyance is indeed the keyword here: after the tight residential rule of AirSpace restraint, we have seen the pendulum swing back towards a happily gluttonous maximalism, based on individual (and often odd) micro-preferences instead of collective Instagram-sanctioned elements. And what a welcome sight it is.
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