CIRCULAR LIVING

Circular Living

A house in Dublin built to accommodate a very special Porsche 964.

Recently completed in Dublin, the O House by Jamie Moran centres around a large circular courtyard designed specially to showcase the contents of the garage. For the time being, that’s Jamie’s immaculate Porsche 964 “Touring”, a car built to imagine what a GT3 Touring might have looked like in the air-cooled era.

When we first shot and featured this car a few years ago, it had covered less than 1000 kilometres since its total reconstruction in Germany, but Jamie has since accumulated 23000 on a mix of track days and cross-continental trips. With the car finished, building a house to match it was a natural next step.

“The lower level is constructed with long handmade Danish bricks, assembled so you get an angled facade that looks almost like a weave, giving it a bit of extra texture” explains Jamie. “The upper level consists of two vertical slabs of precast concrete with a combined weight of 25 tonnes. Let’s just say it was a nervous few hours lifting them into place!

The desire to create a beautiful and peaceful space was really important to us. We had carved off this great plot which was much wider than you typically find here, and we felt this huge obligation to make the most of it and leave the environment much better than we found it.”

“The lower level is constructed with long handmade Danish bricks, assembled so you get an angled facade that looks almost like a weave, giving it a bit of extra texture”

“You move around the garden, you enjoy it all the time, but you don’t actually have to go outside to appreciate it, it’s constantly present.”

With pleated zinc, corten steel, exposed concrete and timber framing throughout, the end result makes for a beautifully serene mix of textures and finishes, dominated of course by the enormous light well cut from its centre. “You move around the garden, you enjoy it all the time, but you don’t actually have to go outside to appreciate it, it’s constantly present.”

The most unique feature of the garden is almost certainly the view it has of Jamie’s Porsche. Its perfectly circular shape has a diameter of 9 meters, which incidentally means it covers an area of almost exactly 64 square meters, a delightfully fortunate series of numbers that will ensure the house retains a piece of Jamie’s 911 for decades to come.