Address: 26 Spencer Street North, North Strand, Dublin 3
Price: €425,000
Agent: Sherry FitzGerald
View this property on MyHome.ie
When someone said, “ah, you’re the fella who lives in the plastic house”, to Pat Davern, the owner of 26 Spencer Street North, he wasn’t sure how to feel, but his architect, Maxime Laroussi, ran with it, recognising that a design worthy of a nickname is worthy of note.
Davern was also placated by the knowledge of Dubliners’ tendency to give nicknames as a form of endearment and as a “blow-in” from Tipperary, he jokes that it could have been called worse by locals.
Having worked as a secondary-school teacher on the northside of Dublin for the guts of 30 years, Davern is currently teaching young people from indigenous communities in Western Australia and plans, eventually, to retire in Spain. Therefore, he is placing the Plastic House – a loft-style cottage extending to 67sq m (721sq ft) with a B3 Ber – on the market, seeking €425,000 through Sherry FitzGerald.
Davern had bought number 26 in the 1990s and lived within its traditional layout until he decided to renovate it in 2008. Unfortunate timing, of course, as the financial crash came, and Davern went to work in the Middle East for two years to help fund the renovation. The work was completed in 2016.
Resourceful and limited by his budget, he went to a well-established architect to ask if he could recommend an architect who was starting out who Davern could afford to work with. That was when he met Laroussi, who founded Architecture Republic in Dublin in 2005 and has since cofounded Urban Agency, which has offices in Dublin, Copenhagen and Lyon.
Sitting down with Laroussi, Davern told him about coming up to Dublin with his parents in the 1970s and and being fascinated by the box-like add-ons for bathrooms to the Georgian and Victorian properties, and he wanted to emulate that, describing it as part of the city’s vernacular. He wanted the protruding second-storey structure to be entirely glazed to exude light like a lantern. He also said he wanted an open-plan layout and a mezzanine floor.
Rather than “thinking I was mad”, Davern says, Laroussi distilled down his ideas into the final design. Laroussi floated the idea of using polycarbonate plastic as an alternative to glass, as it would be more cost effective, better for insulation and more practical in terms of weight for the mezzanine and shower room construction, and Davern was happy to go with it.
When the house was featured on RTÉ’s Home of the Year in 2016, Davern was slightly worried about how his students would react, but they were very positive about it, he says, and he was evermore referred to as “the sir with the house of the year”.
Interior view of 26 Spencer Street North 
Dining area 
Kitchen
Upon entering the cottage from the street, you can survey the entirety of the layout, with high ceilings and the mezzanine floor overhead and the kitchen and living spaces below. The opaque polycarbonate plastic material is a feature throughout; it forms the kitchen units, the doors to storage and the WC in the centre of the ground floor, the base and balustrade of the mezzanine floor and the floor and walls of the shower room protruding from the rear of the house.
You step down a half-staircase into the kitchen, where light comes in from the front window, quite high on the wall. Banquette seating frames the kitchen table under the window. The polycarbonate kitchen fittings are slightly showing their wear at the bottom after a decade of use, so a prospective new owner could look to have them replaced.
[ Rathmines Victorian with contemporary flair and a garden designed for funOpens in new window ]
At the other side of the central block that houses the kitchen is a bright living area with a built-in bench and a large picture window looking out to the Japanese maple tree in the back garden. The original cast-iron fireplace was retained, creating a cosy focal point, with shelving either side of the chimney breast. A WC is built into the central unit, concealed by the opaque plastic door.
Outside, a good-sized central garden, laid in loose stones, leads to a versatile spa-like bathroom with a Japanese bath and a seating area, looking out to planting on a narrow terrace to the rear.
Back inside, the stairway is located within the central structure, leading to the cruciform layout of the mezzanine floor, which accommodates a work/desk area to the front and a sleeping area to the rear, leading to the floating shower room that is walled entirely in opaque polycarbonate with a glass top.
Living space 
Living space with fireplace 
Mezzanine floor 
Shower room 
Shower room seen from the outside 
Japanese-style bath in the bathroom 
Garden patio area