The "stockbroker belt" marketing image being used by estate agents to sell supposedly exclusive housing estates on the outskirts of Dublin has been strongly criticised by a former president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland.
Ms Joan O'Connor, who now runs Interactive Project Managers Ltd, cited the example of Alderbrook, an estate of 189 four-bedroom houses in Ashbourne, Co Meath, saying it had been sold with images of golf clubs and the Ward Union hunt. "It's using the home as a vehicle to sell a lifestyle," she said. Yet if this "horsey-set" lifestyle was reflected in the design of the houses, they would have "wonderful old farmhouse-type kitchens" instead of a "half-hearted attempt" at clinical minimalism.
"The reality is that the Ward Union hunt, which is vaunted in this brochure as being accessible, is a very closed hunt and probably under threat." What Alderbrook's image conjured up was "daddy's the stockbroker gone to the city with a bowler hat and a brolly and I'm taking the children to the pony club", she said. Yet it was remarkable that there were no children playing on the estate.
"There is nobody here during the day because the people who bought these lovely houses are working to afford the mortgages to pay for them," Ms O'Connor said, adding that she wondered whether we were creating "uniclass ghettos" in such estates.
"Hopefully, this estate in time will become full of children, but the sad thing is, in 20 years beyond that, it will be empty of children. And unless we tackle the issue of diversity of housing type, this will become a ghost town of grandparents living in four-bedroom houses."
Interviewed at Alderbrook for the sixth part of RTE television's Nation Building series on Irish architecture in the 20th century, broadcast last night, the former RIAI president said Irish society was changing, the demand for housing was "multi-faceted" and this should be reflected in its design.
"Ideally, in a estate of 200 houses, there should be some form of sheltered housing where older people could live and houses could be recycled and maybe in time, and this is very much a maybe, we might get a genuine mix of social classes."
