Gough Place, Limerick

Comprising 17 social housing units on a brownfield site at the south-west edge of the city centre, the brief for Limerick  City & County Council’s Gough Place housing project included challenging requirements to incorporate a future link road, and to relocate an existing sports pitch in the context of the site’s complex topography. 

PKA’s solution was to create a pair of separate blocks, one on each side of the proposed link road, comprising three-storey duplex apartments and two-storey terraced houses, with the duplexes creating a new streetscape to the Rosbrien Road on the site’s western edge. 

All the three storey duplex units are of the own-door type, comprising a mix one- and two-bedroom dwellings. Ground floor units have a rear private garden, and upper floor apartments have a private ground floor yard, accessed from the staircase core. 

The two-storey housing terraces line one side of the new roadway, and overlook the new all-weather pitch. Their wide-frontage plans are essentially single-aspect, thereby maximising the extent of active frontages onto the public realm. As with the duplex blocks, their railed front gardens provide privacy and security.

The architecture of the scheme is restrained: brick walls, metal windows and slate roofs are composed into carefully-detailed and well-proportioned elevations that refer to the architecture of Georgian Limerick. 

Utilising self-condensing boilers, photo-voltaic solar panels, heat recovery systems, and a highly insulated fabric, the scheme, handed over in March 2023, has achieved an A2 building energy rating.

Client: Limerick City and County Council
Value: €4,800,000

Size: 17 units
Reference: Mr. Aidan Doyle, LCCC
Design: 2017
Completion: 2023