Our client, a fashion designer, owned a house and barn in Galway.
Our clients were keen to have a light spacious house simply detailed with white walls and wood floors. The problem with the Victorian terrace house is that the front rooms always feel dark and cut off from the garden by the rear return.
The solution was to turn the house upside down and open up the whole first floor as
kitchen, dining room and living room and connect this space by means of a new second staircase with the conservatory and back garden. Structural alterations on the first floor are much easier than on the ground floor, requiring much less new structure to hold everything up, so this solution suited the budget. This left the ground floor for bedrooms and bathrooms.