Dun Si, a brand new development that is a mere two-minute walk to the Dart platforms in Portmarnock, has been a year in the making, explains Patrick Durkan, the son of housebuilder Pat, whose Durkan Residential has built thousands of homes since it was founded in 1963.
The second-generation builder has been honing his craft since he was a child and it shows. The new departure for the former managing director of Durkan Residential, sees housebuilder Patrick join forces with Michael Hynes, its chief development officer, and Eddie Byrne, chief operations officer, both previously senior executives with Hudson Advisors, to form new firm D|Res, with a portfolio of lands that will amount to some 6,500 homes.
To date its developments are: Rosefield on Model Farm Road, Cork, which launched last May, where 15 of its 19 units ranging from four-bed semis starting from €475,000 to four-bed detached homes asking from €750,000, are now sold; and Newpark in Adamstown, which launched last weekend with 44 units, 14 more than the firm had planned to launch, sold. Its three beds ranged in price from €300,000-€340,000 and the four beds from €390,000-€405,000.
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Interiors
For Dun Si, Durkan wanted a contemporary look and hired BKD Architects as well as Studio Design Squared, which Cairn Homes used for its Marianella and Hanover Quay projects, to help master plan the development’s look and feel.
The site will comprise 150 units, including two-bedroom apartments, three-bedroom duplexes as well as seven different house types.
For launch, the developer is bringing three and four-bed homes; mid- and end-terrace, semi and detached houses to the market.
The two-storey homes have Mosa brick by Kingscourt that elicit a warm pink colour and feature large, alu-clad Auraplus windows by Rationel that wash every room in light.
Interior designer Denise O’Connor, of Optomise Design, fitted out the show houses and has draped the windows in floor-to-ceiling voile curtains to give them a boutique hotel feel, a luxurious school of thought that extends to the bathrooms too, which have sanitaryware supplied by Ideal Standard.
In the master bedroom en suite, the shower comes with a thermostat to control water temperature because, as David Browne, head of new homes at selling agent Savills, points out, men and women like to wash at different temperatures.
The ceiling heights, 2.7 metres high – almost 9 feet high – across both floors, also help create a sense of space. Attention to flow and lay-out in all units mean that the built-in furniture, the kitchens by Kube and the wardrobes by BSpace, recede into the background.
The kitchens come with quartz countertops, full-height splashbacks and Neff appliances. The flick of a remote control lets you change the colour of the task lighting from cool blue white for when you’re cooking to a warm white when you want to relax.
The bathrooms have large-format tiling by OutHaus, LED halo-effect lighting around the mirrors, which are standard, and concealed downlights in niches over the sink and in the showers.
The homes are all painted in shades from Dulux’s Signature range where you get three different shades of the one colour to add light and depth to an interior.
Prices
Measuring over 111sq m/1,201sq ft, prices for the three beds start from €490,000 for one mid-terrace unit on sale while prices for the three-bed semi start from €500,000.
This style is triple aspect and has been painted in a back in fashion beige colour scheme with a shitake mushroom colour on the kitchen counter tops. The kitchen island in this house style is on the slim side and is probably the only criticism of the scheme.
In the four beds, there is an overall grey colour scheme running through the kitchen and bathroom colours. All these homes have three double bedrooms and a generous single. Prices start from €610,000 for a detached style, 133sq m /1,432sq ft in size. The mid-terrace is a larger house, 152sq m /1,636sq ft with prices from €630,000 while the slightly larger end-of-terrace units, 162sq m /1,743sq ft start from €675,000.
At Dun Si the attention to detail isn’t evident and that is the essence of really good design. It doesn’t have to shout. Take the stairwell for example. Here contemporary panelling draws the eye up to its very beautifully crafted oak handrail which took five different iterations before every member of the team was happy with how it both looked and felt. “You can’t play with form like that in CAD,” Durkan explains. “You have to make it to see what it feels like.”
