Whatever the size of your home or budget, there’s almost always a gap between how you think you live and how you actually do. And in that gap there can be a whole lot of failed expectations and wasted space. A clever architect can help to bring the two closer together.

Allister Coyne of Ailtireacht has done just that at 81 Leinster Road, Rathmines. Coyne is fast becoming the go-to architect in that neck of the woods for upgrading period homes with contemporary interventions, and his work at No 81 is a calling card for the approach.

When the current owners bought the end-of-terrace Victorian for €497,000 as a fixer-upper in 2011, its pebbledash façade enclosed eight bedsits in various hues of grottiness.

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Getting into period

An old photograph revealed that redbrick was its original state, so the owners went about removing, restoring and adding. It comes to market through Sherry FitzGerald by private treaty, with a price tag of €1.5 million for 283 square metres (3,043 square feet) of elegant and functional living space.

Coyne knocked down the thin partition walls, shored up the original structure and forensically recreated missing plaster moulding and architraves. But he also believes that the new should look new, and that it can sit in perfect harmony with the old – in some cases, as he puts it “kissing up to each other”.

In other words, just because you want to live in a period family house doesn’t mean you actually have to live like a Victorian family.

One of the first things Coyne had noticed about these elegant buildings is that modern families tend to live at garden level, where the kitchen is usually housed.

Quiet rooms in the middle

Therefore, the basement door becomes the de facto front door, and the first-floor rooms (or piano nobile, as architects like to call it), while undoubtedly beautiful, tend to be populated only for formal moments or at Christmas time, leaving the middle section of these houses generally unused.

With this in mind, Coyne designed the front garden, which includes an off-street parking space, to draw you up the wide granite steps.

Once inside, the pair of front-to-back living rooms have huge windows, and the light – if nothing else – would draw you in.

They are peaceful places to be, and yet the connection to the garden level is obvious, as a wide new flight of wooden stairs leads down into a wow of a contemporary kitchen, which flows out into a sleek and chic extension.

The kitchen’s island

New is separated from old with different timbering, and the kitchen is also cleverly designed so that the centrepiece is the marble island. Otherwise, the bulk of the utility bits and bobs are hidden from view.

Out in the back garden, reached via a pivot door, you can look up to see that, modern though it is, the architect has kept the proportions in harmony, so that it all seems to sit just right.

There is a guest bedroom and bathroom at garden level, and coming back up the stairs you get a super view of the house sweeping up to the balcony landing above. There are three bedrooms, one en suite, and a family bathroom.

Here is also where Coyne has had a little fun. The en suite opens up to show black glass partitions to the bedroom, and it’s the kind of layout that would bring a smile to your face every time you brushed your teeth.

The bed in the master suite sits up against a partition unit, and has views across the rooftops to the Dublin mountains. In the second pair of bedrooms, look down to see the architect’s favourite feature of all – the black glass roof of the garden-level extension acts like a mirror to the sky.

Simply lovely.