The Times - We turned our 150-year-old Louth farmhouse into a beautiful home that stops traffic
A Co Louth farmhouse has been so subtly renovated that from the outside not much appears to have changed — but the property still turns heads, says Grainne Rothery
David Mackin and Ailbhe Carr, with their daughter, Molly, outside their home (Barry Cronin)
Saturday July 22 2023, 6.00pm BST, The Sunday Times
When planning the renovation of their 150-year-old farmhouse and its adjoining barn near Dunleer in Co Louth, Ailbhe Carr and David Mackin were clear that they wanted outward appearances — from the front anyway — to stay pretty much the same.
“It was a beautiful old house and a beautiful barn,” says Carr, who’s a programme manager at Citi and grew up near Naas in Co Kildare. “We didn’t want to change the windows around and for it to look different. We wanted it to look the same from the road as it would have if you were driving past it ten years ago.”
The farmhouse and its surrounding buildings were part of a farm bought by Mackin’s family in 1994 and had been unlived in for more than 25 years when the couple started looking at it in 2018.
The farmhouse, Cliven Farm, was owned by Mackin’s uncle Nick, who gifted it to them before they started the project
“We had been going out for about a year and were out for a drive along some country roads and passed an old farmhouse,” says Mackin, a farmer. “Ailbhe said, ‘I love that house, it’s always been a dream of mine to do up an old farmhouse.’ I said, ‘We have one at home.’ The next visit up I brought her over to see it and here we are.”
The farmhouse, Cliven Farm, was owned by Mackin’s uncle Nick, who gifted it to them before they started the project. “We were really lucky,” Carr says. “David’s uncle Nick has been so good to us and very encouraging all the way through.”
They were at the early stages of thinking about the project when they spoke to three architects in May 2018 through the Simon Open Door initiative, including Michael Frain of Bright Design Architects. “He loved it,” Carr says. “We were always on the same page with Michael. He really was our champion through all of it.”
While the walls were structurally sound, much of the interior was too far gone for restoration. “Our instruction was to keep the exterior of the house looking the same and we were very open then with the interior.”
The sitting room (Barry Cronin)
When Frain visited the property he noticed remnants of haylofts in the barn and he suggested putting mezzanines in their place, retaining all the old parts of the building and working with the existing windows. “The windows drove how the rooms were structured,” Carr says. “If we wanted to make something bigger we couldn’t really.”
The house may look big from the front but it’s less than five metres — or one large room — deep. Frain’s plan was to work with the existing footprint with one exception — a modest but impactful extension at the back of kitchen. Getting planning permission was straightforward. “The council is really happy to see buildings like this being kept for dwellings,” Carr explains.
The build, which began in November 2019 when Carr was seven months pregnant, was a lot more challenging. “It was hard going. I was living in Dublin initially and David was commuting up and down. Apparently, a commuting farmer isn’t a thing — it was always going to be me who would be moving.”
A subsidence issue and the discovery of water ingress led to months of delays. Covid also had an impact. “We had to reapply for our mortgage every eight weeks, which caused a lot of extra stress,” Mackin says.
The double-height kitchen (Peter Molloy)
The family finally moved into the house at the end of June 2021, ten months later than expected and just ten days before Carr and Mackin got married.
As regards the house looking the same from the road, it’s mission accomplished — to a point. “We get a lot of cars stopping to have a look,” Carr says. “Some of our neighbours laugh and say this house is going to cause an accident. That’s all down to Michael’s design.”
To the front, the main windows and doors are as they were. The original house is covered in a white render and has a slate roof, while the barn is natural stone and now has a clerestory window between the top of its walls and the raised zinc roof.
The main entrance is at the centre where a hallway and a staircase connect the sleeping wing in the old house with the living spaces in the barn. Up a couple of steps from the hall and to the left are two bedrooms, one with an en suite, and the main family bathroom. On the right of the hall, the ground floor barn space comprises a living room that’s partly open to the double-height kitchen and that small extension. Glazed on three sides, it adds less than 7 sq m of extra space. “But it has made a big difference,” Mackin says. “When we’re at our kitchen table it almost feels like we’re sitting outside.”
The tiled bathroom is in keeping with the simple finish of the rest of the property (Peter Molloy)
Beyond is the utility room and a staircase to the smaller of the two mezzanines, which is Carr’s office.
The other mezzanine and the rest of the bedroom space is accessed from the main staircase back in the entrance hall. A sitting room is above the downstairs living room and, like the office opposite it, is set behind tempered glass. “This room probably has the most beautiful views,” Mackin says. “On one side we look out over the Cooley mountains and on the other we’re looking out onto the outbuildings.”
To the left and up a few more steps is the main bedroom, with an en suite and walk-in wardrobe and a new picture window, plus the fourth bedroom.
The finishes are simple: white barn walls, black window frames and exposed steel beams, polished concrete in the ground-floor living space, tiles in the bathroom and herringbone flooring everywhere else. “We thought the polished concrete kept the farmyard feeling — plus with the farm it hides a multitude of dirt,” Carr says.
She’s particularly fond of the barn walls. “Because we took down the animal stalls the walls are not straight,” she says. “Everything undulates. I love them. It looks like a whitewashed finish and gives this beautiful rustic feel.”
Furnishing the house and getting everything as they want it is an enjoyable work in progress. “I’d love to have been able to afford all new furniture but we couldn’t,” Carr says. “I had furniture from my old house. David’s dad bought us a sofa for our wedding present, which was brilliant, and I got a lot at auction.”
Since moving in they’ve also restored some of the old outbuildings with the help of a conservation builder, a Heritage Council Glas grant specifically earmarked for traditional farm buildings and Frain again as the architect. “The roofs had collapsed in and they couldn’t have stayed as they were — they weren’t safe,” Mackin says. “To have the Heritage Council support us was phenomenal.”
It’s always been about more than the house, they say. “It’s been about the whole feeling of the outside spaces and the buildings,” Carr says. “Last summer it was all about the garden. We’ve lots more to do. What we tend to do is have a break for a few months and then do another job that might take a month or so.”
Restoring rather than building from scratch was probably the more expensive option, she says. “I think we would have spent a lot less if we had just built a new house on David’s farm but I loved the farmstead here and all the history of the buildings and I knew we would end up with a very special home if we put in the extra cost and dedication to bring it back into use.”
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