A bit of a controversy

For all the playing around with grand designs, there's still an architectural controversy - how to combine old with new? This one seems to raise heated debates.


Our cottage evolved in the vernacular. It has changed over the past 150 years but it retains strong elements of its original structure (at least in its basic floor plan and materials). This was one of the reasons we bought it, we like old houses, they sit more comfortably in a rural landscape and they mirror those natural materials and textures. However, we aren't paid-up members of the famine re-enactment society and we don't believe conservation means living in the nineteenth century.

One we found nearby that has 'grown'

We have some experience of this. One of us grew up in a (much older) thatched house that still stands and functions as a very comfortable home today...but it does have electricity, a bathroom, mains water, central heating, a modern kitchen and broadband. It does not have earth floors, sacking at the windows, a hole in the garden for a toilet, or cows living indoors! Old houses are homes not museum pieces, so the challenge is simply how to let them 'grow' through their natural lifespan without changing their vernacular personality.


When we extended that other house (in the 1980s) there was much discussion with the planning office and the heritage police about how to do it (it was listed as a protected structure). The solution was to extend by matching the external wall render but using larger hardwood windows and roofing it in a contrasting way to the thatch (using slate). The effect was blended and seamless in one way but clearly a recent addition. We wanted to adopt a broadly similar principle for the new cottage.

A typical L-shaped farm yard

Our starting point was to propose a similar kind of L-shaped extension for our new kitchen/dining room. However, the linear (east-west) alignment of old cottages is a strong vernacular feature in the West and has ancient origins in the thatched long house (often they also project their linear shadow into the landscape through the lines of old strip farming and field walls). So, the main compromise we were proposing was to convert a linear venacular cottage into an L-shape.


We were unsure about doing this but we had no space on the plot to extend in a linear way. We felt much better about this when we looked at the old OS maps and discovered the cottage had been L-shape structure for at least 150 years until the previous owner demolished the integrated cow barn in the 1990s!). The 'traditional' structure we bought turned out to be a modern re-creation. So, which point in history is 'authentic' and when do you freeze the structure of a house in time? We think that you don't.

How ours might have looked (in PhotoShop!)

However, we very much wanted to keep the character of the cottage. So, from the visible aspect of the public road, we wanted our new extension to match the existing in style, scale and materials (white lime rendered, a thatched roof and small window size). From this angle it would become a new extension 'in disguise'. At the back of the house we wanted to take a more contemporary approach, with larger areas of glass opening onto the garden, the mountain view and the westerly afternoon sun.


It was an approach that received mixed reactions. The local planning officer liked it, describing the plan as 'an acceptable design' based on 'a sustainable approach' that would 'integrate into the area well'. Architects take a different view and most subscribe to the principle of separation between old and new (using a wholly different structure, in different materials). We've studied this debate a lot and talked to many people about it. The approach seemed like the best compromise but what we decided is another story...

Virtual development

We had a lot of time to kill over the winter, waiting for some legal complications to finalise the sale. We went through our photos and video clips, read books about conservation and renovation, and watched plenty of old 'Grand Designs' episodes(!). We developed our first ideas about how we might extend and drew up some rough floor plans and elevation sketches (without any precise measurements).

3D architectural drawing software was a real help here. Modelling different scenarios, moving walls, openings and windows, even taking virtual walkthroughs, meant we could 'try out' different ideas in virtual reality. It helped us learn about some architectural principles too (and saved us money on concept development fees).

We used Home Designer Suite to create several different versions, until we had the main elements of an idea in place. We then used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together site photos with 3D drawings and  simulations into a 'before and after' video. It was just a bit of fun really but helped us work out some first ideas so we could explain them to designers and planners. However, we changed our minds later and there are always more constraints in reality than virtual reality!

The importance of planning

Right from the start (before we bought the property) we set out to work with the local planning office, to understand their priorities and test the feasibility of our ideas. Anyone can approach the planning office for general and pre-planning advice. It was worth asking some very basic 'pre-planning' questions and the planning officer was very helpful (with the housing market slump I doubt they had much else to do at the time). We did this by email, because we were out of the country some of the time and because it helped us to have some of the key points in writing before making a formal planning application.

We had a few concerns. First, we weren't sure the cottage would be considered as a habited dwelling. We had to complete the sale of the cottage 'as is' and without any conditions on planning permission, so it was essential to know if there were any limitations to using it as a house (and being able to sell it on again as a dwelling if we ever ran into difficulty).

The Land Registry Folio showed the building. We knew the previous owner had fixed walls, put on a new roof, added a bathroom and septic tanks but we couldn't be sure if it was a house or a barn before that. We did some research and were able to document that it had been continually occupied for more than a century (another interesting chapter in the story). With this information we were able to verify from the planning officer that: 'As it is an existing residential unit the continued use as a residence is acceptable'. 

Second, we weren't sure if we could keep the existing sewerage arrangements on the site. That's a saga that deserves its own chapter but, to cut a long story short, the owner had installed fairly modern septic tanks but without planning permission. The installation wasn't up to current regulations and, more importantly, the plot was too small to make it so. There was no way the planning officer was going to give us any assurance about retaining the existing but she was able to reassure us that: 'In general, where a property is in place and an upgrade to same has been carried out we wouldn’t refuse as the applicant has improved the situation'. We confirmed that 'other sites in that general area have passed the EPA test' and that proposals to upgrade would be 'encouraged and dealt with favourably' even if full compliance couldn't be achieved.

Finally, we weren't sure if we'd have any chance of adding the kitchen extension that we wanted. Without applying for planning permission, we prepared some sketches of what we had in mind and gained some assurance that: 'The proposed extension works appear to be acceptable in design and the Planning Authority encourages the renovation and extension of existing properties to ensure the continued use of them, it is a sustainable approach and the proposed development you have attached would integrate into the area well'.

Although we didn't have definitive answers, talking to the planning office in advance took away a lot of uncertainty and gave us a lot more confidence about going ahead with the sale.

A bit of history

Waiting for the sale over the winter months left us with time for a bit of historical research, which turned up lots of interest. We knew the structure was in the vernacular style typical of nineteenth century Connaught cottages - thick rough stone walls with a single ridge thatched roof and a basic three room layout (bedroom at one end, hearth in the large central room, a byre or store at the other end with a raised platform above it). More of the structure later...

Digging into history, the township wasn't mentioned in Lewis’ 1837 Topographical Dictionary but did appear as a hamlet of houses and farm buildings on the first series Ordnance Survey 6” map (1837-1842), just before the great famine (an Gorta Mór) of 1845-1852. The cottage was clearly visible (with its neighbour) and with boundary walls corresponding to the plot. It appeared as an ‘L shape’, most likely as two or three rooms and a cow barn to the side.

O’Donovan’s Field Name Books (commissioned for the OS in 1838) described the townland as 'occupied by 6 cotters. Rent £2. 2s. pr. acre. No tenure. Soil very good producing potatoes, oats and wheat. Cotters wretchedly poor and houses poor looking'. The second-series OS map (1888-1913) showed that almost all of the townland cottages had disappeared after the famine years, only one or two remaining in addition to ours.

We had some luck in knowing the name of the family that had lived in the cottage and, from their relatives, that they'd been there as long as anyone could say. We've been known to do a bit of family history of our own and the information meant we had a fair chance of finding them in the old Census records. Sure enough, they were there. The 1901 census showed us the family of an old Irish-speaking farmer, born in the early 1800s. There were also church records for their births and marriages in the village.

The house was recorded in 1901 as a private dwelling of three rooms, occupied by one family (seven people), constructed with stone walls and a thatched roof, with three windows to the front and two out-buildings. We found the same family there in the 1911 census, the house described with three out-buildings listed as a cow house, a piggery and a fowl house. The second series OS map, from around this time, suggested the cow house was attached to the cottage in an L-shape with the two smaller structures separate.


This was all a bit of a sideline to planning work on the cottage but it gave us a better picture of how the place had been and the people who had lived there.