This development provides twelve high quality energy-efficient A1-rated dwellings on a former brown-field Council Depot site located in the heart of Dún Laoghaire Town Centre which is a historic port town located south of Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. The site is within walking distance of many amenities including the Main Street of the town, the DART rapid transit station and the Waterfront . There is a mixture of building typologies within the vicinity including two- and three-story houses, multi-story apartment blocks and with pockets of commercial activity. Principally the scheme explores how family housing can be provided in an urban area in a way that maximises the use of valuable public land. It is a dense development that still provides small but usable private open space.

The challenge was to find a way to deliver own-door, high density urban dwellings in keeping with the character of the area. The shallow, railed -front gardens so prevalent in the area offered a neat example of how to limit each house’s external footprint, as did the small courtyard back garden. Splayed windows at the first floor also minimise direct overlooking of neighbours. Each house has access to shared parking spaces located on ‘home zones’ – informal play and amenity areas – which are passively overlooked by the houses themselves.

Planning permission for the twelve houses was submitted to the local authority’s internal planning process in September 2016. The project went out to tender the following February and contracts were signed in October 2017. To maximise speed of delivery and to overcome a widely held belief that rapid build is lower quality, the decision was taken to move large elements of the construction offsite not alone to speed things up but also to ensure higher standards.