The Harvey at Lansdowne Place: A Penthouse Above Dublin’s Lost Botanic Garden

Interiors · Dublin

Reading Time: 8 minutes

The Harvey, a duplex penthouse at Lansdowne Place in Ballsbridge, sits on a plot that has already had two other lives: a botanic garden and a five-star hotel. Goddard Littlefair’s interior work reads that history in materials rather than in signage, pairing marble and bespoke Irish joinery with a rooftop garden that is, whether anyone at Lansdowne Place intended it or not, the third garden this exact patch of Dublin has carried.

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Introduction

Ballsbridge has a habit of building over its own history without quite erasing it. The Harvey, the top duplex penthouse at Lansdowne Place, is the newest example. Its 4,770 square feet span two floors and open onto two private terraces and a rooftop garden with views that take in the Aviva Stadium and the wider Dublin skyline. The interior, by the hospitality-focused London and Porto studio Goddard Littlefair, is dressed in marble-clad kitchens and bespoke cabinetry from the Irish workshop O’Connors of Drumleck. All of that would be a reasonably good story on its own. What makes it a better one is what sat on this ground before Lansdowne Place did, because the penthouse’s rooftop garden is not the first garden this address has had. It is the third, and the two that came before it explain more about the building than any specification sheet does.

A garden that moved twice

In 1806, Trinity College Dublin relocated its Physic Garden to a site in Ballsbridge, after outgrowing the cramped plot it had occupied within the college’s own walls since 1687. The new garden, developed over the following century and a half under curators including J. T. Mackay and later F. W. Burbidge, became one of Dublin’s more significant botanical collections, used for teaching and research rather than public display. Under Mackay, the garden built a scientific reputation well beyond Dublin, and under Burbidge, who took over later in the nineteenth century and was himself a plant collector with expeditions to Borneo behind him, the collection continued to grow rather than simply persist. This was a working research garden with its own institutional history, not a decorative plot attached to a college building.

It stayed on that Ballsbridge land until the mid-1960s, when Trinity moved the collection again, this time to Palmerston Park in Dartry, where the botanic garden operates today. What happened to the vacated Ballsbridge plot is the detail most accounts of Lansdowne Place leave out entirely: a large hotel complex went up on the former garden site.

From botanic garden to five-star hotel

That hotel was the Berkeley Court, which opened on 21 July 1978 and operated as one of Dublin’s grander five-star addresses for nearly four decades. It closed on 1 January 2016 and was demolished within the year. The site then passed to the developer Chartered Land, which brought forward Lansdowne Place: 217 apartments, including 24 penthouses, built by the contractor JJ Rhatigan & Company to a design by O’Mahony Pike Architects, on a project understood to be valued at around €130 million. Around 90 per cent of the units are dual-aspect, with terraces or winter gardens built into the plan rather than added afterwards. Lansdowne Place opened in June 2017, on the same ground where Trinity College’s botanists once worked and where five-star guests once stayed.

The connection is not incidental set dressing. JJ Rhatigan’s own account of the project notes that mature trees along the Lansdowne Road boundary, dating to the mid-1800s, survive on the site today, a physical remnant of the botanic garden that stood there for a century and a half. A reader standing on the Harvey’s rooftop terrace, looking past the planting toward the Aviva Stadium, is standing above ground that has now supported three distinct kinds of green space in just over two centuries: a working botanical collection, a hotel garden, and now a private rooftop garden built for one apartment.

The Harvey’s interior: Goddard Littlefair’s approach

Goddard Littlefair was founded in 2012 by Martin Goddard and Jo Littlefair and has built its reputation on hospitality interiors, working across some of the sector’s best-known hotel groups from studios in London and Porto. The practice describes itself as designers and storytellers, and the Harvey’s interior reads like a hospitality brief scaled down to a single, very large home rather than a domestic brief scaled up. The kitchens are marble-clad, a material choice that does double duty: it reads as permanent rather than fashionable, and it is forgiving of the kind of daily use a penthouse kitchen designed for entertaining actually gets. Cabinetry throughout is bespoke, built to the apartment’s specific proportions rather than selected from a catalogue and fitted around.

That hospitality instinct shows up most clearly in how little the interior tries to prove. A studio that spends most of its working life designing hotel lobbies and suites, where a guest’s first ninety seconds in a room have to do all the work, tends to arrive at a private commission with a sharper sense of restraint than a purely residential practice might. The Harvey’s rooms are not staged to photograph well from a single angle; they are built to be lived in from multiple directions, with the marble and joinery doing quiet, durable work rather than announcing themselves.

The three bedroom suites are treated as a hierarchy rather than three versions of the same room, each with access to outdoor space, whether that is one of the two private terraces or the rooftop garden itself. That outdoor access is the detail that separates the Harvey from a conventional apartment fit-out: Goddard Littlefair has designed the interior knowing that a meaningful share of the apartment’s best moments will happen outside it, on a terrace with a 360-degree view, and the internal layout is built to deliver people to those spaces rather than to compete with them.

A garden built two floors up

A rooftop garden is not simply a terrace with plant pots on it, and the distinction matters for a building sitting on ground with this particular history. A garden at height has to be engineered before it can be planted: the structure below has to carry saturated soil load rather than just foot traffic, drainage has to be designed to shed water without pooling against a roof membrane, and planting has to be chosen for wind exposure that a ground-level garden never has to contend with. None of that is visible to a resident standing in it, which is rather the point. The Harvey’s rooftop garden is built to read as effortless, in the same way the Physic Garden a few hundred metres away in its various nineteenth-century forms would have been the product of careful cultivation rather than accident. The apartment’s garden is smaller and considerably more private than either of its predecessors on this site, but it belongs to the same instinct: put something alive on this ground, whatever else is standing on it at the time.

O’Connors of Drumleck and the case for Irish joinery

The custom cabinetry is the work of O’Connors of Drumleck, an Irish furniture maker rather than an imported name. Commissioning a local workshop for the joinery in a project of this scale is a specification decision with a design consequence: bespoke work made close to site allows for the kind of fitting tolerances and on-site adjustment that an imported, pre-fabricated system cannot easily offer, and it keeps a project pitched as a landmark Dublin address tied to Irish craft rather than to an international supply chain. It is the kind of credit that is easy for a listings piece to leave off entirely, and it is one of the more interesting facts about the apartment precisely because it usually gets left off.

The Residents’ Club

The Harvey’s private outdoor space sits alongside a shared amenity building unusual in scale for an Irish residential scheme: a 6,500 square foot, two-level Residents’ Club. The lower level holds a library and meeting room, a cinema, and a private dining room with its own prep kitchen. The upper level houses a Thermal Suite with sauna, steam room and treatment rooms, alongside a fitness studio and a landscaped terrace. The building operates a 24-hour concierge. Taken together, the club is built to do the work that a hotel’s public rooms usually do, which is consistent with Goddard Littlefair’s hospitality background: a resident does not need to leave the site to get a cinema screening, a treatment room or a private dining room with catering support, because the building already has one.

It is also, in a quieter way, a continuation of what the Berkeley Court offered on this same plot for nearly forty years: a building where guests, or now residents, could eat, be treated, meet and be looked after without stepping outside. Lansdowne Place has simply converted that offer from a nightly rate into a permanent one.

Ballsbridge, and what the site now overlooks

Lansdowne Place sits inside Ballsbridge, the south Dublin district best known for the Aviva Stadium and for a concentration of embassies and five-star hotels along its main roads. The Harvey’s rooftop views run toward the stadium directly, putting a private garden above one of the more recognisable pieces of Dublin’s skyline. It is a useful reminder of how much has changed on this single plot: a botanical research garden, a hotel that hosted state visits and international guests for nearly forty years, and now a residential rooftop with a stadium view that neither the Trinity botanists nor the Berkeley Court’s original architects would have had reason to plan around, because the stadium in its current form postdates both.

The wider district has absorbed this kind of change repeatedly without losing the character that makes it desirable in the first place, which is arguably Ballsbridge’s real design story: a small, leafy pocket of south Dublin that keeps rebuilding its grandest addresses at the same scale and the same register, whatever else changes underneath them. The Harvey is the latest evidence that the pattern holds.

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Final thoughts

The Harvey is a well-specified penthouse by any measure: marble, bespoke Irish joinery, three outdoor spaces and a private club building most hotels would be glad to offer their guests. What makes it worth a longer look is the ground beneath it. Few Dublin addresses can claim a two-century run through a university’s botanic garden and a five-star hotel before arriving at a private rooftop garden of their own, and fewer still have a workshop of surviving trees along the boundary to prove it. The Harvey’s garden is new. The ground it stands on has been growing things for longer than the apartment has existed to say so.