Tony Rhatigan didn’t have to go far to assemble a crack construction team for his dream home in 1974. He is a member of the Rhatigan family of building contractors — J J Rhatigan was his uncle — and he ran his own building company at the time. He also studied architecture at college, so he turned to his former mentor and lecturer, the architect Raymond F MacDonnell to design a five-bedroom, high-tech family home.
The eldest of six children, Rhatigan took over the family business on his father’s death, in 1966. At the time, he had been studying architecture at Dublin Institute of Technology Bolton Street and was working with MacDonnell and Arthur Gibney, of Stephenson & Gibney. “I was in the college on