11 Beach Road is a scheme of eleven homes on a 0.55 acre brownfield site in the town centre of Passage West. The scheme proposes three 1-bed apartments, six 2-bed maisonettes, and two 3-bed penthouses arranged in two detached buildings.

MiDRISE identified the opportunity and acquired the site in 2022 following the publication of the new Cork County Development Plan 2022-2028, which placed much greater emphasis on regenerating urban brownfield sites to deliver new housing close to existing town centres, where residents can live and work more sustainably by walking, cycling or using public transport instead of driving.

The project site is zoned residential and situated in an established residential area immediately adjacent to the town centre zone, making it an ideal candidate site in line with the new national and local planning legislation such as the Town Centre First and 10-Minute Towns policies. The site also posed some constraints to development in that much of the site is on a sloping hillside, with a 14 metre height differential between the lowest and the highest points on the site; overhead power cables cross over the northern portion of the site preventing new development in this section; and the disused but RPS-listed Glenbrook railway tunnel passes underneath the site, effectively bisecting the site in two halves.

Our work lay in getting the measure of the various site constraints, mapping out the various exclusion zones and developing a thorough understanding of the site in cross-section to identify the ‘Goldilocks zone’ at the centre of the site, defining a development footprint that sat neatly in between the hill, the tunnel and the overhead cables without impinging on any of them, and designing a proposal that could slot into that exact space.

The site features three level plateaus at the top, middle and bottom, and each of these plateaus benefit from direct street frontage on Bay View, Marina View, and Beach Road respectively, which facilitated a design solution that overcomes the sloping terrain by interfacing with the street at three different storey heights. This enabled us to avoid any communal corridors or lift and stair risers in the scheme and for each home to have its own front door. As such, the tricky site constraints have not compromised the quality of the homes but has actually helped to generate a unique and interesting end product. The uppermost 3-bedroom penthouse in particular will make a fantastic home with broad views out over Lough Mahon and the Great Island Sound.

The proposal was developed throughout 2023, engaging with the planning authority through the pre-application process twice in March and June, before lodging the planning application in December.