Site Specific: Dick Mack’s Pub

Luke Matone Architect, Dingle, Ireland, 2023

Originally opened as a bar and leathergoods shop in the 1899 this famous Dingle institution has been in the ownership of the Mac Donnell family for four generations. The original ‘cross-programming’ continues to this day and customers waiting for work to be completed in the shop can drink in the pub in the meantime. In the evenings music and events take place amidst the stocked shelves. The interiors are constituted from several premises which themselves have been subdivided into smaller rooms, bars and nooks. Dick Mack’s is characterised by layers of inhabitation and by the patina of materials in light.

LMA have grafted new spaces and facilities on to the existing building, paying careful attention to way new joinery can amplify and extend the existing conditions. A new extension makes a ’barely there’ addition at the rear of the building.

LMA An extension and renovation at the rear of Dick Mack’s Pub in Dingle to provide rooms, a bar and new toilet facilities.

The layout and materiality of the new back bar takes cues from the existing front bar, a stalwart of Dingle since 1899. The material palette is intentionally limited. Timber is employed practically and creatively. It is used as a wall lining to soften the acoustics, to provide decoration and ornamentation, and forms fixed furniture elements such as the bar counter, bar-shelving, seating and snugs.

Views through and access into adjacent rooms and spaces have been enhanced by retaining existing openings and creating new ones.

The use of repeated elements in the design is a key concept. On new walls, a timber veil of uniformly spaced CNC-machined solid oak 2”x 2” battens wraps the interior like a decorative ribbon along a horizontal datum. Below bar-counter height these battens are left solid. Above bar-counter height, at eye level, these battens are scalloped. Doors into toilets punctuate this ribbon. Fluted glass within snugs creates a mesh for privacy.

On the existing walls, the thick cement render has been removed in order to celebrate the historic stone fabric of the original house. Construction idiosyncracies have been celebrated: a lintel formed from a piece of the Dingle railway track has been exposed and sealed; brick reveals within openings in the stone walls have been repaired and extended.

A single storey rear extension creates a new room overlooking the south facing yard and towards Dick Macks Brewery. Behind the local stone façade, a nod to materiality of St Mary’s Church that sits over the road, the form of this room is derived from a thorough analysis of the scale and proportion of the existing rooms within the Victorian-era-built house.

NOTES

Thanks to Luke Matone at LMA for sharing this project with us.

Photography © LMA.

Published 12th December 2023.