The Old Mill
Clonakilty, Co. Cork
The outdoor space for a restored mill building now working as a restaurant and eight guest rooms.
- Garden size
- 890 m²
- Project type
- Contemporary
- Investment
- €96,000 – €110,000
- Programme
- 14 weeks
The brief
A commercial site with a domestic feel required: somewhere guests would sit for two hours, that forty covers could pass through, and that two staff could maintain.
What we did
Commercial does not have to mean municipal. The palette is the same one we would use on a private garden — stone, timber, generous planting — but the build-ups underneath are heavier and every surface is slip-rated and wheelchair navigable.
Circulation was the hard part. Guests, staff carrying plates and deliveries all needed separate routes that never cross, on a site that narrows to four metres at one point.
Planting is deliberately over-scaled and low in species count. Twelve species repeated in large drifts reads as confident, and two staff can learn to maintain it properly in an afternoon.
Outcome
The terrace seats fifty-two and is booked out most summer evenings. Maintenance runs to about four hours a week, which was the figure the client needed it to be under.
The layout, before and after
The site survey and the finished design, drawn to the same scale on the same boundaries.
