Dublin City Civic Offices

I needed to visit Dublin City Council offices in order to arrange parking permits for our cars.

The Civic Offices were highly controversial when built.  In the late 1970's plans were made to build on the historical site of Wood Quay.  There was huge public outcry but the plans went ahead.

Architect Sam Stephenson designed two huge bunker like buildings which were not liked by the general public.  I have to agree that they are not attractive from the outside.

However, I am currently in the building as I blog and internally I quite like it.  With a glass roofed atrium and internal foliage it has a very pleasing feel about it.

Do you like the look internally?

Here's the outside entrance.

Architecture in Ireland in 1950's

This morning we walked down to Number 31,  a mid century mdern beauty designed by Architect Sam Stephenson, which was open to the public as part of the Open House Architecture Festival.  

We were meeting friends at 2pm for lunch and tours of the guesthouse started at 12pm.  We got in line at 11.30am (we were in 2nd place) as we needed to have the tour completed by 1pm or so.  

Here's some pictures that I took of the place.

Here's the exterior of the building.  It is a mews so the entrance is down a lane at the back of a building.

 The Piece de Resistance in the house - the sunken conversation pit around the fireplace

 The ground was covered in tiniest white rectangular tile mosaics.

 We got to sit in the conversation pit to fully experience it - here I am making myself comfortable!

 To the back of the room was a bar that was tiled in mosaic mirrored tiles.  Very cool!!

The tour took about 20 minutes as we only toured a few of the rooms in the guesthouse - this is a working business so obviously we could not see the whole building.

You can stay in this guest house!   A word of warning though - some of the rooms are based in the main house so make sure you request a room in the Sam Stephenson house.

More info here!

Our conversation pit being built.

Click here to view our conversation pit!

And you can see the one off bespoke coffee table designed for the space in our Conversation Pit.