Glass Bottle

Situated on Sandymount Strand at the base of the Poolbeg Peninsula, Glass Bottle is a new place for work, for living, and for enjoying the best that Dublin has to offer. Glass Bottle is a complete city quarter. At completion, it will be home to some ten thousand people and quarter of the homes built will be social and affordable. It will provide a million square feet of commercial space.

Glass Bottle is positioned in a uniquely historic part of Dublin, with a rich heritage we drew upon in our work. James Joyce’s connection to this place (in a number of passages in Ulysses) and to Dublin gave us an internationally understood and revered reference. This was complimented by the site’s previous use — the Irish Glass Bottle Factory gave us a rich resource of visual material, and a connection to the local community.

We were inspired by the creations of both Joyce and the factory: a first-edition cover of Ulysses, and a found bottle base produced in the 1970s by IGB. Colour was drawn from its east-facing aspect, dominated by the expansive horizon over the sea at Sandymount strand. Other aspects of the treatment reference tide and wave data, and the presentation is elegant, colourful and somewhat atypical for the sector. 

The brand lives in application in a launch website, hoarding, workwear, and a range of material for temporary placemaking development (meanwhile uses).