Surely we could do something like this for all the ugly bungalows in towns in Ireland and increase density at the same time Revival in action (2020) – two dull postwar villas replaced with 11 apartments in vernacular style in Antwerpen, Belgium

34 comments

  2. I’ll catch shit for this, but while I think the villas are a complete waste of space I find that vernacular style to be ugly AF.

    An ugly house is better than no house though.

  8. I mean in the long term that would be great but it involves actively taking houses off the market by knocking them down and them building more which wouldn’t help in the short term

  10. The only thing stopping this being done is the cost. Designing, procuring materials and building to the standard in the photo is extremely expensive and not very market friendly

  11. We have plenty of open space, why knock existing buildings down? The issue is the number of builders, not space to build.

  12. We could do something like this with NIMBYS who object to new developments for no good reason. Might make them think twice before putting their trivial concerns over giving people access to housing.

  14. I can only imagine the objections going in over and look and the historical value of the bungalow. But biggest problem would the value of the site of the houses and the garden around that itself would be very valuable and would drive the price of the development sky high on top of the already high construction costs. Now we have 11 housing units that no one can afford to buy.

    I really wish I could add /s.

  20. Could be done but limited in demand I would think, outside of Dublin, Cork and maybe Galway?

    Any smaller towns, the demand is for houses rather than apartments. Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny from what I have seen are going with the approach of building new estates on the edge of the city/ town. Demand for apartments would be right in the city centre, in which there are not too many bungalows on single sites really.

    Dublin has a fair few bungalows in prime locations but they tend to be terraces, so you would need to have someone buy all of them to attempt something like this and they currently go for such insane money, this is probably not a feasible approach.

  23. People just don’t want to live in our small towns and villages, they’d rather live a few km outside on 1/3 an acre of land complaining about the lack of services. Where my parents are from they don’t even want to live in already built houses, there’s whole townlands abandoned, they want to build a new McMansion.

    A lot of the old derelict houses aren’t suitable for modern living and are in such a bad state demolition and rebuilding is the only option.

  24. Wow that apartment complex is beautiful looks like individual houses with character I love it so much. Better than a big square building.

  29. Yeah, but that would require us to put the greater benefits of society ahead of the people who currently own that land.

  32. It would make life so much better if you weren’t assaulted by visual gore every time you stepped outside your house. In terms of our urban areas, Ireland must be one of the ugliest “high income” nations on the planet.

  33. Yes, I understand the whole “preserve our heritage” argument. But it has been applied badly. Do we need to preserve all the Georgian buildings in Dublin? Do we need to preserve all the cottages and so on? Or should we designate some as to be preserved and other areas as not protected. We can’t preserve our heritage at the cost of our future

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