The project architect for Hanover Quay in Dublin's docklands has provided glazed winter gardens in the apartments. Emma Cullinan reports

How restrained our large buildings have become, with their flush façades. Cladding and curtain walls allow the tagging of material onto building frames and the result has been a proliferation of flat panels of white reconstituted stone (or imitation) combined with glass.

So when something comes along with a bit of texture - carefully detailed - it knocks your socks off. Take de Blacam and Meagher's Wooden Building in Temple Bar or - venturing further afield - Wickham van Eyck's beautifully composed brick and render Hoselydown Square at Butler's Wharf in London.

That's why O'Mahony Pike's (OMP) Hanover Quay (phase one) building overlooking Grand Canal Dock in Dublin comes as something of a relief. The mixed-use development - mainly apartments on top of restaurants and an office floor - sits on a recessed base, rises up through apartments sheltered by "winter gardens", and recedes again at the top where the penthouses sit.

OMP is designing an astonishing number of apartment schemes at the moment and has developed an effective checklist that results in homes which maximise natural light - through atriums in common areas, huge windows on stairwells and glass walls in many livingrooms and bedrooms.

Internal kitchens will often have glass blocks beside rooms that do get natural light. This all tends to make much of spaces which, let's be frank, are often pretty tight.

There's also an OMP interior fit-out which often includes brushed stainless steel handles, Phillipe Starck-style taps, plus timber frame windows and black and white - or neutral - coloured tiles in kitchens and bathrooms.

An interesting development in Hanover Quay is that the bathrooms and kitchens come complete from Italy and are craned into the apartments. The concrete pods arrive with the tiling, toilets, baths, ovens, units and so on attached, giving the rooms a factory finish. Arthur Duff of Duff Tisdall went to Italy with Park Developments to advise on the design of these.

Within this design framework from a large architectural practice come buildings with a variety of clients/developers, planning conditions and project architects. In such large practices there are various teams who work on different projects and one architect's name which often comes up from the OMP stable, with praise attached, is Conor Kinsella.

He designed the Conyngham Road scheme opposite Phoenix Park, which has a host of architects living in it, and he was the project architect on Hanover Quay.

The scheme is in an area controlled by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) in which the docklands master plan called for a certain height of building and for schemes that express the vertical rather than the horizontal.

There's an impressive clutch of buildings designated for this area, with Portuguese practice Aires Mateus e Associados' Hyatt Hotel on-site beside Hanover Quay and Libeskind's theatre just down the way. OMP, which was responsible for the Millennium Tower on Grand Canal Dock, came to Hanover Quay via a competition for a nearby site.

Architects Benson and Forsyth (designers of the Millennium Wing at the National Gallery) won and now, due to various shenanigans, architects Horan Keoghan Ryan have that job.

Meanwhile, runners-up OMP were offered Hanover Quay. "We were delighted," says Kinsella. Not surprisingly. This is a prime site, with the first phase facing south over a large expanse of water with views to the mountains beyond. And it's right near the centre of Dublin.

The DDDA took a close interest and the scheme bears some elements from the DDDA wish list, such as restaurants at ground level - to provide life on the street during the day and evening. The front of the building is of limited height and the rest of the scheme - currently on-site - is of varied heights to provide interest from roof level downwards.

Park Developments has sponsored Diarmuid Gavin's Chelsea garden this year and, after the show, that garden will then come back to permanently reside in an internal courtyard in Hanover Quay. The side of the scheme facing the hotel has own-door duplexes with a considered threshold between pavement and front doors to create a domestic scale. There are overhangs above the door, bin stores and, behind a wall, are the vents to the car-park below (not something I'd be keen on outside the front of my home).

But what really attracted the DDDA to the OMP competition scheme was the enclosed balconies, known as winter gardens. This Lumon system from Finland is a first for Ireland. It effectively creates conservatories for apartments, and is a huge bonus in our climate. Not only does it enable people to sit out all year round but it lowers heating and lighting costs. It also connects the interior space with the exterior; in this case you can't see any building below but look clean out over the water and into space.

OMP has two or three office trips abroad a year to look at architecture worldwide and the system was spotted in Finland and The Netherlands. So the winter gardens have been tested in even harsher climates than ours - with the Finnish company promising that you can sit out in the enclosed balcony when it is snowing, not something that will concern us too often.

Lumon has been hoping to get into the Irish market for a while and this should see an expansion of this type of balcony here - with other architects already having included them in housing projects not yet built.

Internally the glazed balconies, with opening windows, add to the tight spaces, which have also been enhanced by higher than usual ceilings (up to 8.5ft), tall doorways and glazing in internal doors. The feedback from some of those who have moved into the Hanover Quay apartments is that they'd like their balconies to be even wider.

Externally the bands of glass give the building texture - and having the façade divided into the three separate parts adds to the vertical feel.

Kinsella envisaged three prisms. The glass works well with the water and the light around it, and the recessed base makes the building light on its feet, but all that glass does give the façade the look of a commercial building.

Kinsella seems keenly aware that the elevation will benefit from the domestic intervention. "I can't wait to see how people use the balconies and what sorts of plants and furniture they install," he says.

The breaking up of a façade into mosaic pattern is a stunning feature of the GSW Hochhaus in Berlin, by Matthias Sauerbruch and Lousia Hutton, in which the curved glass and steel elevation has panels in various shades of red and orange which shimmer in the light as you move around in front of the building.

Meanwhile in Paris, Edouard François' Flower Tower, a 10-storey apartment block in the 17th Arrondissement, has been brought to life by huge pots of bamboo on all of the balconies. These provide sun screens, swishy noises in the breeze and make the building look like the Hanging Gardens of Arrondissement.

This isn't the architect's first plant block. In Montpellier his Sprouting Building comprised apartments clad in steel cages filled with stones in which a vertical rock garden was created.

Hanover Quay is a classy structure whose heavy use of glass should be softened by the human touch.