Brighton Wood is a development of 15 apartments and 85 large detached and semi-detached houses set in a wooded site on Brighton Road in south Dublin’s Foxrock.
Waterman Moylan provided civil and structural engineering consultancy services for the development. The client, Castlethorn Construction, wished to retain the sylvan environment and to enhance the biodiversity of the site as part of the development. As a result, all healthy trees were retained, and the new homes were arranged in areas of the site to minimise impacting on the woodlands. This resulted in small clusters of dwellings interspersed across the site.
Our first challenge was to find an access road configuration which would serve the houses but would not damage tree root systems. This resulted in a sinuous road layout where the vertical and horizontal alignment was adjusted to avoid deep excavations when in close proximity to trees.
The project incorporated extensive SuDS innovations to address surface water, seeing swales incorporated along the roadside with all run off from the roads directed to these swales, negating the need for roadside gullies. All houses have external water butts, permeable paving in front of the properties and bound granite chips in private parking areas, while grasscrete blocks are used for visitor parking areas along the roadsides.
Surface water run-off from the dwellings is conveyed by a pipe network which discharges to a new pond located in a low-lying area of the site and surrounded by a meadow on one side and a copse on the other. This feature has been designed to provide storage for a 100-year storm run-off, and our team worked with the landscape architect and project ecologist to create a new wetland habitat in this area.
The successful integration of these new homes on the edge of the city into the existing natural woodland environment contributed dramatically to the huge success of the development.
Client: Castlethorn Construction
Architect: O Mahoney Pike
