Pasparakis Friel Extends a Donegal Farmhouse into a Live-Work Gallery on the Bog

Some buildings accumulate meaning the way peat accumulates depth: slowly, compressively, over decades. The Moss Farmhouse in Glenties, County Donegal, is one of those places. For more than thirty-five years, what began as a conventional agricultural cluster of house, byre, and outhouses has folded in on itself, absorbing art, a small-batch jam and chutney enterprise, and the daily rituals of domestic life until the distinctions between work and home, gallery and kitchen, dissolved entirely. Pasparakis Friel's 130-square-metre extension does not attempt to resolve that blurring. It leans into it.

What makes this project genuinely interesting is the restraint of the move. The extension sits at the far edge of the existing farmhouse, tucked back so that the original yard and lane-end approach remain essentially unchanged. From the road, you would barely notice anything new. Step inside, though, and the spatial character shifts decisively: from the warren-like intimacy of the old cottage rooms into volumes shaped by the demands of displaying and making art. The architects borrow the formal language of surrounding agricultural buildings, particularly in the corrugated roof and simple gabled profile, then fill those barn-like shells with north light, borrowed light, and quiet walls that exist to hold paintings.

Holding the Yard

The original farmhouse is a low, whitewashed line against a vast Donegal sky: pitched slate roofs, rendered walls, the kind of building that reads as landscape as much as architecture. Pasparakis Friel understood that the most important design decision was what not to touch. The south-facing yard, the central outdoor room of the farm, remains intact. The green corrugated metal roof of the extension echoes the agricultural sheds that once surrounded it, sitting comfortably alongside the older structures without competing for attention.

Seen from the field, the farmhouse still appears as a singular, discreet presence at the end of the lane. The extension peels away at the back, visible only once you enter the courtyard. It is a strategy that respects the grain of the place: the gravel, the potted plants, the mature trees framing the space are all continuous with what was there before.

Old Rooms, Intimate Scale

The existing cottage retains its warren-like character. Rooms are small, thresholds are thick, and views are choreographed through doorways that frame paintings as deliberately as any gallery hang. The plastered fireplace alcove with its wood-burning stove is pure domestic warmth, a hearth that anchors the house in a tradition of rural Irish living. Clay tile, whitewashed floorboards, and tongue-and-groove ceilings speak a material language that predates the extension by generations.

These older rooms are not renovated into blankness. Art occupies every available corner, a condition that has held for over three decades. The doorway views, each one a layered sequence of wall, painting, and light, make the case that a small house with good bones can be a better gallery than most purpose-built ones.

Vaulted Volumes for Display and Making

The new volumes announce themselves through their ceilings. Locally sourced, mill-finished timber boards are laid in vaulted configurations that lift the eye upward and give the rooms a generosity entirely absent from the cottage. These are not lofty for the sake of drama; the height creates the wall area needed for large-format paintings. A red curtain painting hangs against white plaster, reading clearly because the room was dimensioned around it. Full-height glazing at the gable end pulls the garden inside and connects the studio spaces to the landscape.

The studio itself opens through glazed doors to a stone wall and sunlit garden, establishing a physical relationship between making and the outdoors that feels essential rather than designed. North light enters the painting studio cleanly, while borrowed light softens the transitions between adjacent rooms, drawn through from one volume to the next rather than admitted directly. It is a nuanced approach to daylighting that avoids the harsh contrasts common to rural extensions.

Material Continuity

The material palette is deliberately limited: clay-toned microcement as a continuous floor surface, oiled plywood for built-in furniture and shelving, raw timber for ceilings, white plaster for walls. These are not luxury finishes; they are working surfaces chosen for their ability to recede. The plywood bookshelves lining the hallways do exactly what good joinery should, holding books and art without calling attention to themselves.

A detail worth noting: the staircase treads in plaster meeting the wall beneath the plywood shelf. It is a junction that reveals the care taken with transitions throughout the project. Where microcement meets timber, where plywood meets plaster, each material handshake is clean but not fussy. The restraint allows the art on the walls, and there is a lot of it, to set the tone of every room.

Light as Connective Tissue

The double-height room with its painted brick wall, wooden ladder, and skylight is perhaps the most spatially charged moment in the house. Light drops in from above, washing down the textured surface of the brick and illuminating the room without any direct window at eye level. It is a strategy borrowed from artist studios and ecclesiastical buildings alike, and it works because the room is otherwise deliberately plain.

Throughout the extension, Pasparakis Friel use light as connective tissue between spaces. Timber-framed doorways lead from one sunlit volume to the next, each threshold offering a shift in ceiling height, material, or orientation. The covered entry with its timber decking and garden view functions as a decompression chamber between the wildness of the landscape and the curated calm of the interior. Velfac windows are deployed precisely, their slim profiles maximizing glazed area without introducing the industrial overtones of curtain walling.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals the logic of the intervention. The new volume extends the linear footprint of the farmhouse along its existing axis, maintaining the relationship between the building cluster and the river that runs alongside the site. Circular tree canopies on the floor plan are not decorative notation; they represent the mature specimens that define the courtyard and garden spaces, and the architects have clearly designed around them.

The elevation drawing of the gabled extension, flanked by two mature trees, confirms what the photographs suggest: this is a building that derives its proportions from the agricultural sheds of the region. The glazed gable ends are the primary departure, turning what would be a blind barn wall into a lantern. The linear layout on plan shows a carefully sequenced progression from the tight, layered rooms of the cottage through transitional spaces into the open, light-filled volumes of the extension.

Why This Project Matters

Rural Ireland is littered with extensions that either ape the vernacular so faithfully they feel like theme parks or assert their modernity so aggressively they humiliate the host building. The Moss Farmhouse does neither. Pasparakis Friel have found a register that is contemporary in its spatial ambition and material clarity but rooted in the forms and rhythms of the agricultural buildings that define this part of Donegal. The green corrugated roof, the gabled profile, the locally sourced timber: these are not nostalgic gestures but pragmatic choices that allow the extension to belong.

More importantly, the project takes seriously the idea that a home can be a legitimate venue for art. Not a collector's showcase with track lighting and climate control, but a living, working environment where paintings are made, hung, rearranged, and lived with. The quiet walls, the borrowed light, the careful proportioning of rooms to accommodate large canvases: these are architectural decisions driven by a deep understanding of how an artist actually uses space. That specificity, that willingness to shape a building around a life rather than a brief, is what gives this small project its weight.

Moss Farmhouse, Glenties, County Donegal, Ireland. Designed by Pasparakis Friel. 130 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Peter Molloy.

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