A Victorian public house in Cork, stripped back and rebuilt across two levels after a fire damaged the rear of the building.
Blackwood Design’s starting point was the surviving stair, a spiral in oak that had been boxed in behind plasterboard since the 1980s. Freeing it changed the plan. The ground floor now reads as one volume with a gallery running around three sides, and the stair sits at the pivot where the two levels meet.
Below, the room is divided into snugs by full-height timber partitions with glazed upper panels, so drinkers are enclosed at shoulder height and connected above it. The beadboard panelling is stained a dark chestnut, studded at intervals with brass upholstery nails that pick up the pendant light. Seating is buttoned green leather, a colour the studio matched to a fragment of original banquette recovered from beneath the bar.
The mezzanine balustrade is the piece the practice fought for. It is cast iron, made from a mould taken off a surviving Cork balcony section, with a repeating foliate pattern that throws a complicated shadow onto the ceiling. Above it hangs a second tier of the same profile, purely visual, which turns the ceiling into a dark filigree screen and hides the ventilation runs.
Lighting is warm and low: opal glass shades on brass arms over the booths, a chain-hung fitting with amber glass drops at the bar, and small fairy lights threaded through the ironwork at Christmas, which the owners now leave up all year and the studio has stopped arguing about.
The bar itself is short, deliberately so, with the taps at one end and a service well behind. Tables in the open floor are cast iron with timber tops and can be cleared for music.
The jury praised the archaeology of the project — the recovered leather colour, the cast balustrade, the reopened stair — and the fact that the pub trades as a local rather than as a heritage exhibit. It marked the entry down slightly for the mezzanine sightlines, where the upper tier of ironwork blocks views of the stage from two of the gallery booths.
Blackwood Design is a Cork practice of six, working almost exclusively on licensed premises across Munster. Founded in 2009 by Aoife Blackwood, who spent her twenties restoring shopfronts, the office has developed an unusual specialism in reversing bad refurbishments: its first task on most jobs is establishing what was removed and when. It keeps a photographic archive of Cork pub interiors dating back to the 1890s and makes it available to other practices. Blackwood has argued publicly against the export of the generic Irish-pub package. The office employs a full-time joiner and works with a foundry in Cork for its ironwork. It has completed twenty-six licensed premises and lists every one on its website, including the two it considers failures.