At the end of a bog road near Glenties in County Donegal, Pasparakis Friel extends a working farmstead into Moss, a house that now doubles as gallery and painting studio for a family that has made art here for decades.
Life and work have never been separable at this cluster of buildings. The house once stood flanked by a byre on one side and outhouses on the other, humans and livestock sharing the routine of a south-facing yard that served as the central outdoor room. Over time the byre was absorbed into the domestic realm and the outhouses became the base of a small-batch jam and chutney enterprise. For more than thirty-five years, art has occupied every available corner, made, stored, and hung throughout the farmstead. Those blurred boundaries between living, making, and selling gave both the food and the work a particular richness.
The latest move builds on that legacy rather than replacing it. The original whitewashed farmhouse stays discreetly at the end of the lane, its low warren of rooms and their telltale draughts left intact, a cast-iron stove still burning under a painted tongue-and-groove ceiling. The new extension is set back at the far edge of the house, its dark corrugated-metal cladding and pitched roof drawn from the language of the surrounding agricultural sheds. From the field it reads as one more farm building, low against the Donegal hills.
Inside, the register shifts. The extension opens into volumes that are tall, light-filled, and calm, shaped by the demands of display and making. North light falls into the painting studio, where large canvases lean on a paint-spattered easel beside a plain timber chair. Borrowed light softens the transitions between rooms, and generous stretches of wall are held empty for the curation of work. A clay-toned microcement floor runs unbroken underfoot, warm against soft neutral plaster and pale timber-lined ceilings.
The palette stays deliberately restrained so the art can define the experience. Oiled birch plywood forms the built-in benches, the sunken bookshelves stacked with monographs on Doig and Picasso, and the low steps that thread the level changes together. Functional antiques and small collectibles are layered throughout, a pine dresser, a mantel clock, ceramic vessels, giving the contemporary rooms a lived, inherited weight.
What holds Moss together is sequence. The project unfolds as a series of connected spaces, each offering somewhere to pause, sit, and look outward to the garden, and each revealing another painting as it turns. Old and new stay in gentle conversation, the draughty cottage rooms on one side and the open gallery volumes on the other, so that moving through the house feels less like touring a collection than finding it, room by room, the way it has always accumulated here.
