Portico for a private house

We were approached by Coli O'Donaghue of DMOD architects to design and create a portico above a front door of a private house. The portico had to support a glass roof but the clients did not want the portico to be built with large structural sections of steel. The new owners also knew of the connection between the house and Seamus Heaney as he had lived there for many years and they wanted to celebrate this connection between the portico and Seamus Heany's work.

Another building that our clients had always admired was the Museum Building in Trinity College which had a most unusual string course that was only carved after been fitted in place. The stone masons were allowed to carve whatever they felt like that day as long as it was organic in form !

After long discussions with Coli, we decided to create our own open string course below the gutter of the portico which would contain hand forged organic flowers, leaves, plants and of course a blackbird which was mentioned in one of Seamus Heany’s most famous poems. That poem was composed in this very house.

Our structural engineer Lisa Edden of Cora Consulting Engineers was an immense help as she knew we had to keep the structure as light as possible and was able to solve one problem after the next.

To keep the structure as light as possible, we used 50 mm square solid bar, three in each corner and each of the uprights were forged and textured with a repeating pattern that we discovered on the museum building in Trinity College.

The corner posts were braced together using Coli’s idea of three-dimensional side walls and between the four three-legged corner posts and the two side walls, these supported the open string, gutters and roof sections.

For additional support, we forged Celtic style gusset scrolls with the same texture that we had forged into the corner posts and these two scrolls were fitted to the front face of the portico.

Like the Museum Building in TCD, Coli insisted that we designed and hand forged the infill of the open string course so many hours were spent reading Heany’s work for inspiration. Over a period of two months, we forged fern leaves, acanthus leaves, branches, vines, poppies, barley, daffodils, oak leaves with acorns and of curse a blackbird surrounded by ivy.

The infill was all hand forged in both sheet steel and mild steel using traditional blacksmithing techniques and then all the sections and decorative ironwork were bolted together after galvanising.

Rather than painting the portico which would have covered up so much of the detailing and texture, we patinated and then sealed the galvanised steel work. This finish gives a wonderful slightly mottle effect, similar to worked lead.