Building Of The Month - August 2017 - Holiday House

The house no longer exists. It was replaced by the next generation of the family with a larger dwelling in 2011, to a design on the same spot but an altered setting that removed the essential rustic romanticism of the more petite original, which had been conceived as a wilderness retreat in a forest by the edge of a lake with great fishing. The fishing is still great but photographs of the muscular new fishing lodge show it sitting rawly upon a suburban lawn, lightly fringed by a scalped forest.

Anderson’s clients, Peter and Ray Bär, belonged to a Swiss private banking dynasty, a family known for its sharp eye for quality and its support of the arts. In 1957 the family had gifted a Henry Moore bronze outside the entrance to the Kunsthaus Zürich. 30 years later, Peter commissioned the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely to make scrap-iron lamps for the bank’s Café Münz on the city’s fabled Bahnhofstrasse.

The house has rendered walls, a simple fibre-cement slate roof and a dry-stone rubble boundary – the same palette of materials he used at Castlepark. “Generally, wherever we’re building, we try to limit the number of materials,” Anderson told PLAN in the summer of 1974. “We [Irish] are not like the Continentals,” he said. “[When] they build something, they build it well. We’re always skimping and cutting corners with the result that our buildings are an amalgam of all different materials and textures and colours.” There was no corner cutting at Golden Bay for this exquisitely refined, yet modest, house.

The house is casually pulled up onto the hillside from the shoreline. A gentle slip rises to the garage-cum-boathouse (big enough to take two typical Lough Corrib boats, commissioned to a traditional design), its maw projecting forward from the house, with service rooms behind. Also on the lower level are a full-depth hall and a pair of children’s bedrooms. To their rear and up half a level is a guest room with a tall corner window offering an angled view to the lake. The projecting master suite sits atop the children’s rooms in a fibre-cement-clad oriel that shares a fire breast and a plain timber balcony with the pine-ceilinged living room. A long, thin, open-plan kitchen, utility room, dining area and planted terrace set half a level below, on the roof of the boathouse, completes the accommodation of this timeless, now-vanished, 1970’s classic.