In conversation with Paul Moore about a Belfast Beauty…

For more than 15 years, McCann Moore Residential Architects Belfast have been creating contemporary, elegant homes that their clients love to live in. This practice is creative and dynamic offering a rare blend of practical hands on experience and creative design flair. Their aim is to deliver bespoke and inspirational designs that are completely personal to you.

McCann Moore spends a great deal of time with their clients trying to understand their vision and discussing how they can translate that into beautiful, yet practical spaces. The team relish the prospect of designing a home from scratch but are just as inspired with the challenges of extending or converting an existing building.

Here, Paul Moore talks about a modern extension to a 1920’s house in Belfast.

“This project turned out really, really well. I became involved with this project as the clients liked our stuff on the website and they contacted us to work on this property.

The house was a semi-detached Victorian red brick house. Typical of those houses in that it had a tiny kitchen, an outside toilet and a coal shed off the kitchen,” said Paul Moore.

“The clients wanted a nice kitchen, dining area and a cool space to relax in whilst enjoying the view of the garden. The house was very disjointed to the garden prior to the renovation work being done.

“From start to finish, this project ran very smoothly. I met with the clients and walked through the house whilst discussing the brief.

The brief was tweaked a little but the essence of what we first looked at was what was built,”
enthused Mr Moore.

Mr Moore studied at Queen’s University graduating in 1996. He has worked for Todd Architects and was an associate in RPP.

Paul set up McCann Moore Architects with his business partner Sean McCann in 2007.

“I loved the end result and the clients had great taste as well and they were great to work with.”

With more and more people embarking on renovation work with their own homes at varying levels across the board, what advice would Paul offer them?

“Hit pause and take your time! Get a feel for what you want to do to your home and there is potential in every home. Figure out what works and doesn’t work about the house. Set yourself a realistic budget. Make up a priority list of what you want and consider your lifestyle now and going forward!

“What’s really important is to make sure your house connects really well internally so the transition between the existing house an extension (you may be doing) is as seamless as possible. Don’t just plonk a box on to the back of your house. Connect the house well internally and externally whilst bringing as much light into the house as you can and bring as much of the outdoors indoors and vice versa,” Concluded Paul Moore.

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