Design Approach

Keepers Lock fully embraces the opportunity of its train station setting, prioritising active travel and direct pedestrian and cycle links into Clonburris and Kishoge stations. While the wider Clonburris SDZ sets the framework of ambitions and parameters for the area, this scheme builds on it — clustering built form around open spaces and pocket parks that connect directly through to the Fonthill Road, and exceeding the baseline expectations for permeability and public realm quality.

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Close collaboration with multiple stakeholders shaped the scheme at every stage of design development — the local authority, infrastructure delivery teams, and adjoining landowners — to ensure Keepers Lock both stands on its own and integrates coherently into the wider Clonburris urban district as it emerges over the coming decade.

Masterplan & Public Realm

A central Link Road connects each of the residential cells, framed by three-storey duplex blocks that establish a defined urban edge to the street. Running perpendicular to this, a large north-south park retains an existing hedgerow as a key landscape feature, threading green space through the heart of the development and connecting each part of the urban framework. This central spine assists with wayfinding and orientation, while delivering high-quality amenity and activity space at the centre of the neighbourhood.

An urban plaza with active retail and residential frontage anchors the route to the train station to the northeast, while smaller pocket parks and shared surfaces are distributed throughout the scheme. The result is a framework for daily life and interaction in which buildings provide spatial definition and active boundaries, and landscape provides the connective tissue.