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n 2023 Architect John-Barry Lowe and his family moved into their new home in central Dublin. After overcoming some major hurdles along the way, the story of Teach Spruis (Spruce ouse starts at the beginning of the fi rst Covid lockdown in – just as ohn-Barry and Carol were fi nalising the purchase of the site. owever, John-Barry’s inspiration for the family’s new home goes back a lot further and incorporates key infl uences taken from having grown up in Dublin’s classical Georgian architecture as well as the period architecture of Berlin and Madrid where he lived as a student.
“I have wanted to build my own home since I was inspired by a ‘house of the future’ design project in my fourth year at the School of Architecture, niversity College ublin, says John-Barry. “It was in the 1990s, just at the beginning of awareness about the need to create homes that worked for modern society and the environment. The brief specifi ed that we should design modest homes of 125m2
seemed to me to be the sweet spot for most family units, and I decided there and then that I would like to make this the template for my future home. The result of this almost life long desire is
Teach Spruis, a two-and-a-half-storey family home in central Dublin which is designed to achieve assive ouse standards and is the fi rst private dwelling in Ireland to be formed entirely of cross laminated timber CLT. The Lowe’s purchased their small site with existing planning approval for a two storey fl at roofed house that had been designed so it would not compromise a neighbouring house’s window, which is unusually set within the gable at attic level. The design, however,
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didn’t effi ciently maximise the site so ohn-Barry created a new design which would work better for his family and this passed planning without a hitch.
which
“A key design factor was maximising the living space on the small footprint and creating fl ow and connection between spaces. I didn’t want to design anything that was superfl uous or wouldn’t meet my expectations once it was completed. Most of my professional work in the past 20 years has been about renovating existing houses in Dublin, so I was aware of the limitations this can place on the design and construction and I didn’t want to have those constraints on my own house, he explains. I’ve also seen how easy it is to become obsessed with labels for rooms so that you can end up building a room for each function. Ideally I wanted to accommodate the various functions in as few rooms as possible, which would allow for the creation of a more varied set of rooms of differing scales and qualities, unfettered by specifi c functions. Having lived in numerous properties including some in Berlin and Madrid, all built in different periods, which he describes as his ‘university of life in buildings,’ John-Barry has taken learning and inspiration from each period, but his true passion is for Georgian architecture – he grew up in an exceptionally spacious Georgian house in ublin and has his current offi ce in a eorgian house. “It’s impossible to spend time inside Georgian buildings and not have characteristics such as their quality of light and high ceilings affect your designs. I have defi nitely incorporated learning
from all the different places I’ve lived into the design of Teach Spruis, especially the Georgian infl uences such as maximising light wherever
LOW POINT
The fl at roofs were the low point. Not only were they horrible to build but once built it took us months to deal with two separate leaks now fi xed in one of them which was soul destroying.
HIGH POINT
Seeing the CLT super- structure going up. After eight months of planning we could suddenly see our home taking shape before our eyes in just eight days.
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