14 Henrietta Street (2017 - 2019)

14 Henrietta Street is a Georgian townhouse in Dublin, built c. 1748 and appropriated in 1877 to house multipleworking-class families. This project encompasses a 12-year phased programme of works (2005-2017) to rescue No. 14 from imminent collapse, and to conserve and adapt the house for new cultural uses, culminating in the 14 Henrietta Street Museum.

Jury Citation: This exemplary project shows the value of an evidence-led, research-based approach to conservation, while ensuring that the architectural character of the building was revealed and enhanced. The team has skilfully charted the difficult task of conveying three hundred years of history and change, while still managing to be contemporary in approach. With decision making informed by research, there is a fine balance of conservation, repair and modern intervention, with no space for conjecture. Difficult problems were solved with care and imagination, and the work serves as a template for a more rigorous and restrained approach for the conservation, refurbishment and re-use of historic buildings. The contemporary addition to the rear, which provides essential services for the building’s new use, is finely and modestly executed. In its new iteration as a museum the building reveals stories that stretch from the affluence of the early Georgian era to the tenement housing of over one hundred citizens in the first decades of the twentieth century.