Architect Amanda Bone’s house graduated from a BER rating of F to C2 after her bright, open-plan revamp

WHEN architect Amanda Bone bought this two-bedroom semi on Aughavanagh Road in Crumlin in 2006, she began knocking down walls. Out came the divide between the two rooms on the ground floor, to make a large kitchen/living space. The back wall came off too, to be replaced by floor-to-ceiling folding glass doors that, open, double the size of the living space by bringing the garden into the picture.

Upstairs, angled walls between a large front room and small bedroom and bathroom were replaced by straight walls that resulted in a larger bathroom and took from the front room to create a decent-sized back room.

Light was what Bone was after in this house, number 68 – which is now for sale through Sherry FitzGerald at €279,000 - and she’s scooped it up helped along by the house’s south-west facing garden and north-east front. The orientation was one reason why she chose the house; another reason was its proximity to friends; there are a good few architects dwelling in this and surrounding streets.

Once stripped back the house was put back layer by layer, with rewiring and new plumbing, insulation in walls, floors and the roof, and the addition of double-glazed, low-E glass windows – taking the house from an F rating to C2.

“I decided to do the whole thing properly so it would only ever need repainting in the future,” says Bone. Having done the fundamentals she kept the interior minimal: she built a utility room onto the side of the house – accessed from the front, the rear patio and internally – to hide washing machines and bicycles. The kitchen is tucked into a recess at the back of the ground-floor livingroom so that you don’t see it when you come in the front door.

All of the units are free of handles, as with the cupboards and wardrobes throughout the house. The units are in white MDF and there is a grey Formica worktop. The floor is in a pale grey rubber – lovely and forgiving, says Bone.

Upstairs the front bedroom has a yellow wall behind the bed – with a recess for lights and books – that was inspired by a stay in architect Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille. When Bone got home she had the colour copied locally.

On one bedroom wall are handle-free, push-open wardrobes and on the opposite side is a vanity-unit hidden behind a door. A make-up artist advised getting daylight-spectrum lighting to avoid hitting the streets looking like a clown: the fluorescent tubes were bought from Wink Lighting.

The back bedroom has the Corb-yellow on its wardrobe; the bathroom is walled in mirrors. Fittings include taps designed by architect David Chipperfield for Ideal Standard and the basin is by Catalano.

The patio has year-round colour and a raised deck that brings it level with the internal floor, so once those back doors are folded back the dining table can be lifted straight outside. “Because this house was small I wanted to make it uncluttered and bright. It was about making it feel spacious,” says Bone. And she’s succeeded.

How Amanda got a C2 BER

ARCHITECT Amanda Bone put in an A-rated combi condensing boiler (Victrix Zeus Superior); insulated all external walls on the inside with high density Kingspan polyurethane; insulated all new internal walls and a new floor upstairs and used mineral wool insulation in the roof space. She put in radiators, by Merriott, with thermostatic controls and fitted the house out with German Vogrum double-glazed painted hardwood doors and windows with low-e toughened glass.

Rate my energy efficiency: the A to G of improving your home's BER

WILL getting your energy rating up and your heating bills down attract more buyers? “A BER is a benefit as opposed to having monetary value,” says Jackie Horan of Sherry FitzGerald.

“It is not the first thing people will ask about but they are becoming much more energy aware.”

BERs (building energy ratings) look at energy use and carbon emissions in buildings by taking into account the size of a building, what it is built from, thermal insulation, ventilation, the efficiency of the heating system, orientation, thermal mass, type of fuel used and any renewable technologies.

But it isn’t an exact science, says architect and BER assessor Gavin Smyth. “A BER assessor has to make lots of assumptions: for instance, you can measure the thickness of a wall and take a stab at how much insulation it has by knowing how old the building is and you can look at what a window is made of and whether it has single or double glazing. “Critically, the software doesn’t take into account user behaviour and it assumes occupancy levels of a certain number of people per sq m.” It also doesn’t look at the standard of building work and because of that, BER ratings for existing buildings are not as accurate for new ones.

Ratings run from G to A and, says Smyth, it is quite simple to get from a G to a D but the higher you go the harder it gets; an A1 is almost impossible in an old house. You can make simple changes such as putting in low-energy lightbulbs, adding draught strips to windows and doors, putting a lagging jacket on the hot water cylinder, having a system that heats radiators and water separately , putting thermostatic controls on the walls beside radiators (rather than having them on radiators), blocking unused chimneys, and replacing wall vents in old houses with small trickle-vents in windows.

“This is where BER gets slightly dangerous ,” says Smyth. “I’m saying this with my architect’s hat on. If someone from a different trade, say a plumber, did the BER assessment he might say that it will be simple to take out all wall vents to get a better BER rating but that’s not the whole story; there are other building regulations, to do with ventilation, that you need to comply with.”

Having done all that you are then into more costly additions, to the building fabric itself – e.g., putting in new windows, adding insulation to external walls, having a much more efficient boiler and installing solar panels. That could bring the house up to a C2. “Those last two things are what you get most grant assistance for, from the SEI (Sustainable Energy Ireland),” says Smyth.