Madge’s Garden

Type: Public Work

Client: Dunnamaggin Development Group & Workhouse Union

Location: Dunnamaggin, Co. Kilkenny

Stage: On going

Architectural drawing of small outdoor structures with roofs, seating areas, and surrounding trees, with people walking and standing around.

Participatory Co-Design and Rural Regeneration

Madge’s Garden at the heart of Dunnamaggin Village represents a long-term collaboration with the Dunnamaggin Development Group and Workhouse Union, proving how public co-design can lead directly to approved capital works. Beginning with public engagement workshops through the Town Ecologies programme, we evaluated how the culture of play and public dialogue could generate long-term architectural solutions.

The resulting scheme shifts a vacant plot into a flexible public asset. The project includes a community operated park, an open-air market, and the adaptive reuse of an existing barn into a community arts centre. 

Architectural site plan showing outdoor landscape, seating areas, trees, a building with multiple rooms, and pathways.

By successfully taking the project from initial community consultation through to full planning permission and securing major Town and Village Renewal Scheme funding, Madge’s Garden demonstrates our practice's capacity to translate grassroots strategic planning into realised, civic infrastructure.

architects workshop at GAA club
Set of colorful abstract art prints with circles and triangles on Eames-style wooden easels, leaning against a textured white wall.
A detailed map of a residential area with roads, houses, and a blue highlighted section. It shows a creek running through the landscape, with directional labels pointing to nearby towns.
A grassy backyard with a beige house, a stone wall on the left, a wooden fence on the right, utility poles, and a partly cloudy sky above.
People gather outdoors near an old stone building with a sloped roof, surrounded by greenery and tall trees, participating in an event with colorful signboards on strings between sticks.
A person holding a colorful survey flyer with the title 'A Vision for Dunnamaggin, Have your Say'. The flyer features illustrations of houses and trees. Next to it are survey forms, pens, and a photograph of people planting trees, on a wooden surface.
adaptive reuse community project for a new arts centre in an old barn, regeneration project architects

Islander Architects were selected for Work House Union’s Town Ecologies co-design & community engagement programme. The context for this engagement was the rural village of Dunnamaggin, Co. Kilkenny.

Read more about Town Ecologies and watch the film here.

An old stone building with a sloped roof, to be renovated to become public toilets
community led design project public launch

Drawings: Islander Architects

Photography: Islander Architects

Funded by: Kilkenny LEADER & Town and Village Renewal Scheme