Glamorous and dangerous, Sam Stephenson stood out in a talented generation. The architectural wunderkind of 1960s Dublin, his buildings were bigger and more prominent than everybody else’s. More controversial, too.

As well as being a good architect, Stephenson was also a world-class interior designer. His home, in a mews off Leeson Street, with its modish sunken conversation pit and built-in white leather couches that appeared to go on forever, was the greatest party space of the decade. He seemed more talented, famous and well-connected than all of his contemporaries put together.

Even his problems were of a different scale to theirs. The story goes that while on a business trip to Boston in November 1973 he made a routine telephone call to his secretary in Dublin, only to be told that Jimmy Tully, the minister for local government, had ordered the construction of the civic offices at Wood Quay to stop, and that newspapers were reporting that the roof of the Central Bank, then rising in Dame Street, was 30ft higher than it should have been.

Was there really such a momentous phone call? Stephenson picks up the story. “Anything else?” he asked his secretary. “Oh, yes,” came the reply. “A cow fell into the swimming pool at Ballynoe House,” his 100-acre estate in county Carlow, stocked with prize cattle. “Well, you’d better get the f***in’ cow out first,” he said. “I’ll deal with the others when I get back.”

For some reason, everybody who heard that story at the time made a connection with the infamous horse’s-head-in-the-bed scene in The Godfather, then showing in cinemas. Perhaps they remembered that it was Stephenson who drove his close friend Charles Haughey away from the Four Courts a few years earlier, following the arms trial which ended in Haughey’s acquittal on charges of conspiring to import arms.

When Stephenson got back to Dublin, he found everyone running for cover and leaving him hung out to dry. He jokingly recalling Brendan Behan’s dictum that the only bad publicity is your obituary. The irony was that, as public buildings, both the central bank and the civic offices were exempt from the need to obtain planning permission, but applications had been lodged in the interests of transparency.

It has been a long road back, via London in the 1980s. Was it hard to take? “Not really,” he says. “Time passes. It didn’t ever dent my faith in architecture.”

Still the best known architect in Ireland, Stephenson could afford a little smile as he turned 70 last Monday. He has weathered a storm that raged for the better part of 40 years.

He was 22 when he won the RIAI travelling scholarship, which exempted him from his final year of studies. He married and the prize paid for an extended architectural honeymoon spent travelling on a scooter through France, Switzerland and northern Italy.

He designed Christmas windows for Brown Thomas in Grafton Street, carving a huge winter landscape in polystyrene using only matches. They gave him an office in the attic in return for advising wealthy customers on aspects of interior design. He turned it into a stylish Japanese interior. “There were so many visitors,” he says, “I thought at one stage that I should dress up in a kimono and squat on the floor.”

It was an exotic island in a bleak landscape, a magical stage onto which the liberated post-de Valera generation could project its dreams during the early days of the republic’s headlong rush for modernity.

In 1960, he formed a partnership with the brilliant Arthur Gibney that would last 15 years and help define the era. Their big break came in 1962, when they won the international competition to design headquarters for the ESB, in the middle of the longest Georgian streetscape in the world.

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