On Little Mary Street in Dublin, the facade of Staycity’s aparthotel extends into a redbrick colonnade, suggesting a continuity with the district’s Victorian warehouses and markets. A bustling reception area opens on to a long lobby, where, past a busy restaurant decorated with pop art and big-leafed plants, the room ends at a security door.
According to the development’s planning application, the door leads to a closed wing of the building where, next to a retail unit, two art studios sit waiting to be used. The hectic come-and-go of a hotel complex might seem an unlikely environment for such creative space, but it’s part of Dublin’s plan for expanding its cultural infrastructure.
In this era of rapid construction, the city council is relying on newbuilds to deliver art spaces. One objective in its 2022-28 plan is for developments above 10,000 sq m to dedicate 5 per cent of their floor space to community, arts and culture. Can private commercial businesses deliver cultural infrastructure? Staycity’s aparthotel started business two years ago. The studios have yet to open.
Five years ago the site had 12 studios. The Complex arts centre was then leasing a former fruit warehouse, which it turned into an impressive facility housing offices and a gallery.
Upstairs, an auditorium benefited from underfloor heating provided by a business that stored plants next door. “Old buildings have such potential before they’re demolished. It’s great to see them used, and activated, and loved again,” says the centre’s director, Vanessa Fielding.
The Complex had to move out shortly after, when the landlord sold the site to developers. It’s now based on the corner of Mary’s Abbey and Arran Street, about 150m away. But such repurposing – what architects call adaptive reuse – has long been responsible for replenishing Dublin’s cultural supply.
Past examples include the Tivoli Theatre (formerly a cinema), Andrew’s Lane Theatre (a warehouse and clothing factory), SFX Hall (a church venue), City Arts Centre (warehouse), Block T in Smithfield (a tile factory and office), South Studios (a warehouse) and Theatre Upstairs (a pub function room).
None of these exists any more, as sites slipping into disuse are more likely to be demolished to make way for hotels, apartments and offices. The Complex’s current premises (another fruit warehouse) aside, adaptive reuse seems a rarer method for delivering art spaces.
Fielding says the city council hasn’t made it any easier. When the Complex moved to Little Mary Street she discovered new regulations requiring even temporary lets to apply for permission to change use. “You really have to bring it up to the spec of a new building, and that’s really hard with an old building,” she says. “It takes nine to 12 months. You’re looking at having it inspected four times – and €5,000 every time. That’s all before you start trading.”
It seems like a double standard, and it rankles: small-scale operators must go through a prohibitive change-of-use process while mixed-use developments are allowed to start business even as their required art spaces sit empty.
“It comes down to the right people with the right energy,” says Yvette Monahan, who with her partner, Seán Breithaupt, opened the former South Studios on New Row South. “The cynicism possibly comes from the wrong people doing it, who like the idea of some cultural pizazz and giving energy to a place but not understanding what that entails,” she says.
In 2007, Monahan saw an advert on Daft for the top floor of an 18th-century warehouse fitted for office use. She and Breithaupt, who are both photographers, were looking for somewhere to set up a studio, but they ended up building something resembling a cultural hub, moving in several studio residents.
When the remaining high-ceilinged rooms of the building became vacant, they converted them into spaces that could be hired for photography and film shoots, installing an infinity wall, used to create a seamless backdrop for photo shoots, in the warehouse’s former loading dock, which they named the Shutter Room.
Ten years in, their landlord sold the site. The former studios are set to be replaced by another mixed-use development looking to combine a hotel with artist space.
Hotels around the world have long been prestige curators of visual art, often promoting their private collections. Some hospitality businesses go so far as to describe themselves as producers of art, or even artworks themselves – “art hotels”. Several have artist-in-residence schemes. The Fogo Island Inn, in Newfoundland in Canada, allows visual artists to work in studios with an aim of exhibiting in the hotel’s gallery. The Art Ovation hotel, in Florida, supplies hotel rooms with sketchbooks, and encourages guests to peer into an on-site studio where an artist is at work.
“It sounds like an art zoo,” Monahan says.
Breithaupt lists the essentials for a workspace: privacy, electricity, toilets, options to block natural lighting, a blend of blank and feature walls. “Separate areas for people to hang out, the heating. That’s important, that it’s nice and warm. Hard floors are important, that are easy to clean,” he says.
In Dublin’s docklands, the Arts Council is converting a flour mill into an “artist campus” with 45 studios. A feasibility study suggests varying sizes: small, medium and large studios, with floor-space of 15 sq m, 26-32sq m and 50sq m. A spokesperson for the council confirms that their ceilings should be 2.7-3m high.
The most obvious question that might be asked of a development that hitches a hotel to an art space might be that of who’s best to operate it. In London the Bankside Hotel has a mixed-medium studio curated by Contemporary Collective, a gallery organisation now exhibiting in a white-box space in the hotel. In Dublin, the Dean Hotel offered a striking example of artist studios based away from the hotel, not as spectacles for guests, and co-ordinated by a director from the live music and film industries.
Staycity says that a “dedicated community and charity manager is now in place at Staycity’s head office in Dublin, tasked with overseeing community and charity engagement across all of Staycity Group’s properties, including plans for the creative spaces in both Francis Street and Little Mary Street”. The company hasn’t clarified if the operator has arts-sector experience.
The company’s Francis Street aparthotel is on the demolished Tivoli Theatre site, where a new arts facility is supposed to fill the void left by that venue. It has been sitting closed since January 2022. Last year the visual artist Eve Woods secured a three-week run in the empty space. She and her collaborator Aoife Ward had the idea of hosting a series of events by local arts groups, to demonstrate the venue’s potential as a “hyper-community space”.
“There’s no cladding on the walls. There are no toilets. There are six sockets for electricity, but they’re all in one corner of the room. They told us, ‘We’ll sort all this, and it’ll all be done’ by the time we’re in the space,” Woods says. “Three months beforehand, we checked in. They said they haven’t done any of those things and that we can’t have events in the space without toilets.” Staycity says the Tivoli space “was offered on an ‘as is’ basis given that fit-out plans were not yet finalised”.
Instead, Woods and Ward used their access to the room to hold a razor-sharp exhibition Con: temporary Quarters, filled with grim ironies of Dublin’s cultural collapse: a red-velvet cinema chair – a nod to the Tivoli’s history – adrift in a concrete expanse; a strangely poignant coat rack rescued from South Studios.
After wrestling with the venue’s lack of functionality, Woods and Ward complained to Dublin City Council. A spokesperson says that “investigations and an inspection carried out by the area enforcement officer revealed that the event space has been provided as per approved plans associated with the site”. Woods points out that an architect-designed internal auditorium remain unbuilt.
When The Irish Times asks about enforcement, the council says that, as a planning authority, it “has the power to enforce the provisions of all aspects of a planning permission subject to the requirements of the planning legislation”.
Con: temporary Quarters did leave a mark. Neon-yellow floor tape still outlines the missing interior walls. On a recent Friday evening, the long-derelict Iveagh Markets sitting uncomfortably still, Francis Street seemed a long way from Dublin’s after-work bustle. Shine a phone torch through the glass walls of the Tivoli venue and you could see the neon tape: the walls of a phantom auditorium, far from the roar of the old club nights, wrestling events, comedy shows and plays.
