Projekt: ein Bad in Irland Jahr: 2024, Typ: Umbau eines bestehenden Bades in einem irdischen Ferienhaus Team:  Yelyzaveta Loktionova, Benedikt Hartl Ort: Carraig-na-gCat, Reenogreena, Irland

The commission to renovate a bathroom in a holiday home on Ireland’s west coast arose under special circumstances. During an artist-in-residence stay in Reenogrena near Glendora, in the immediate vicinity of the holiday home of the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Opposite Office developed a temporary “House of Wind” for an exhibition. The director visited the installation, was enthusiastic, and sought a conversation. As the foundation typically supports visual artists—particularly in the field of textile art—and only rarely includes architects in its residency program, the encounter developed into a productive exchange about space, context, and materiality. As a result, a request followed to provide architectural advice for the renovation of the bathroom in his Irish home.

The house is situated in an exposed position near the cliffs, overlooking the Atlantic; to the rear, it opens onto a vast landscape characterized by ferns and blooming heather. The existing bathroom was small, dark, and carried a certain mustiness attributable to the coastal humidity. It also faced north and offered no view of the sea. The financial resources were limited and did not allow for substantial structural intervention; neither an extension nor a structural transformation was realistic. The question therefore became: how can maximum spatial and atmospheric quality be achieved with minimal means?

The “open bathroom” relocates the central functions—bathtub, toilet, and washbasin—from the confined interior into the surrounding landscape. The sanitary objects were placed as autonomous elements within the topography among ferns and heather. Each object defines its own small site: a tub with a view of the sky, a washbasin in the shade of the vegetation, a toilet with a distant view toward the sea. Nature assumes the tasks previously fulfilled by walls, ventilation, and windows: illumination, ventilation, atmosphere. The wind becomes the air-conditioning, the light the ceiling lamp, the vegetation the spatial boundary.

Ireland is not a neutral backdrop but an active component of the design. The changeable weather, the intense humidity, the lush green of the ferns, and the violet of the heather shape the experience. The bathroom is understood not as an enclosed functional room, but as a situation within the landscape. The design thus responds to the specific qualities of the site—its vastness, its ruggedness, and its simultaneous intimacy. Sitting among the ferns, the body itself becomes part of the terrain. The conventional separation between inside and outside, between private hygiene and public nature, is questioned—without negating pragmatic requirements.

The building services concept of the “open bathroom” is consistently conceived as a low-tech, self-built system. The aim is to avoid industrially prefabricated systems and instead develop robust, comprehensible, and locally producible solutions that function with simple means and remain repairable.

Domestic hot water is generated by a self-constructed, DIY instantaneous water heater. The basis consists of simple solar thermal modules or commercially available solar panels used exclusively for energy generation. The heating itself is achieved through a reduced, openly routed piping system based on a heat-exchanger principle that operates without complex control technology. The construction is deliberately visible and intelligible—not a black box, but a legible technical object that translates solar energy directly into heat.

Rainwater storage is likewise not conceived as underground, invisible infrastructure, but as a built landscape. An above-ground cistern is created from materials found on site: large boundary stones from the property, leftover timber from old board cladding, supplemented by a simple sealing layer. The storage element becomes part of the topography—half wall, half water basin—and makes the water cycle spatially perceptible. Filtration occurs through simple sedimentation and gravel filter stages, without technical processing.

A composting toilet is used for the WC, though formally further developed as a design object. The aim is to retain the familiar typology of a conventional toilet and not visually foreground its “eco” character. The technical components are concealed within the base; the external appearance remains familiar. Functionally, the system operates waterlessly and odor-free through natural ventilation; formally, it integrates seamlessly into the ensemble of tub and washbasin.

The entire building services concept is understood as a constructive extension of the architectural idea: technology is not concealed, but simplified. It emerges from the site, from available materials, and from fundamental physical principles. Rain is collected, the sun heats water, wind provides ventilation, organic matter is composted.

In this way, an infrastructure emerges that appears less installed than built—a technology not industrially delivered, but produced on site, and which derives its appropriateness and autonomy precisely from that fact.