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Gormley Publishes Planning Guidelines on Design Standards for New Appartments

17/09/07

Gormley Publishes Planning Guidelines on Design Standards for New Apartments

Mr. John Gormley, T.D., Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government today (18 September) published guidelines for planning authorities on Sustainable Urban Housing: Design Standards for New Apartments. 

These guidelines were issued as a consultation draft for public consultation earlier this year, and the Minister expressed his thanks to the numerous public and private bodies who made valuable submissions and contributions to the drafting process.

Launching the guidelines, the Minister pointed out that apartments account for over 20% of all new dwellings nationally, and about 80% in Dublin City.  “With about 600,000 new dwellings required in Ireland over the next decade, it is vitally important that the design of apartments provides a good quality of life for their occupants, including families with children.” 

The primary aim of the guidelines is to promote successful apartment living, by responding to people’s reasonable demand for well-designed apartments, particularly in terms of better internal space standards, including storage space.  The guidelines pay particular attention to the needs of children – for play space, for quiet study areas, for places to store bikes and buggies.  While the guidelines set a range of minimum standards for the design and layout of new apartments, sufficient flexibility has been built in to allow both developers and planning authorities to respond to the needs of particular local housing needs, for example, the trend towards smaller household sizes and the need to ensure affordability for first-time buyers

The guidelines require the following minimum overall floor areas for apartments:
One-Bedroom      -  45 sq m
Two-Bedroom      -  73 sq m
Three –Bedroom  -  90 sq m

The Minister highlighted the need for apartment developments to be located in neighbourhoods which, through good design, provide good integrated services such as public transport, schools, shops etc.  They also need to be designed with quality living in mind through better layout and safety features.  “This means making sure that the people have easy access to public transport, schools, health services, crèches, shops and so on.  It also means that residential developments are better designed to encourage family living, with pedestrian safer paramount.”

Apartment developments can contribute to the achievement of higher densities in cities and towns, and thus to more sustainable forms of urban settlement.  Higher density developments should result in more compact settlements, and can help to sustain the viability of public transport.

Building on these apartment guidelines, the Department is preparing draft guidelines for New Sustainable Residential Developments for issuing in the near future to replace the 1999 Residential Density Guidelines.  These new guidelines will comprehensively address the need for high-quality, fully integrated development.  The guidelines will be accompanied by a design guide booklet which will illustrate best practice in sustainable residential development, across a range of scales and issues.

The new apartment guidelines are being issued to planning authorities and An Bord Pleanála under section 28 of the 2000 Planning Act.  This means that the guidelines have to be taken into account firstly in framing development plan standards for new apartments, and secondly in determining planning applications and appeals relating to proposed apartment developments.

ENDS

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