20 Kildare Street is a spectacular office development in the heart of Dublin’s historic business district. The scheme gives a new lease of life to a group of the city’s earliest Georgian homes – the restored buildings will form the grand entrance to 6,100 square metres of new workspace.

Because of the prestigious location (close to the Irish parliament, national museums and the five-star Shelbourne Hotel) it was important to hide the construction works during the build. Working with designers CI Studio we went a step further, turning the site into an attractive feature of the street.

The biggest challenge was to wrap the frontage of the period buildings. CI wanted the wrap to look like a sheer skin with no seams. Which meant producing, printing and installing a single, millimetre-perfect piece of fabric. Installed on a wild and wintry night, the final wrap measures 32 x 13.5 metres and is fixed in place with heavy duty eyelets and storm grade straps.

At street level, the new offices are advertised with an elegant hoarding that plays with light to express the brand identity and attract attention. To reproduce the fine  brand typeface (without thickening any stroke weights) we used our ADX illuminated letters. The slender letters range from 7mm wide to 1.6 metres tall and are made from solid acrylic glass and lit from within by high performance LEDs.

CGI visuals of the new offices are displayed in irregular, diamond-shaped lightboxes and framed with a geometric lattice of chrome strips that fan out along the length of the hoarding as you walk past. The clip-on lightbox faces are printed with a matte finish on a special textile that repels water and UV rays to keep the images sharp.

To crown the piece, we installed a bank of thirteen LED floodlights on bespoke projecting brackets to light the site at night and keep 20 Kildare Street firmly in the mind’s eye.