Love Our Place: Kill O' The Grange
Love Our Place explores how small, community-born processes and interventions can make us feel more connected to our local places.
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in partnership with A Playful City, led the first Love Our Place project focused on three small but significant sites along Kill Avenue: Baker's Corner, Rose Park and the laneway to St Patrick's Terrace. Working alongside the Dún Laoghaire Central Active Travel project, the aim was to co-create wayfinding and placemaking interventions that make these new connections feel more legible, and more like home.
Building on Love Our Laneways
Love Our Place is the natural next step from our award-winning Love Our Laneways project in Sallynoggin. It uses the same phased, hands-on approach: meeting people where they are, inviting open conversation, building local partnerships and finding opportunities for light-touch change. This time, though, we worked at the scale of a whole neighbourhood rather than a single laneway.
Walking, Talking and Drawing Together
Over several months in 2025, we knocked on 202 doors, collected 546 surveys (including 242 from children), and ran walk-and-talks, seniors' workshops and a youth workshop with Crosscare. Students from IADT led creative workshops with pupils from Monkstown Educate Together National School, and IADT graphic design student Cadhla Butler created the project's visual identity. In total, more than 685 people took part.
We then shared early design concepts through an outdoor exhibition along Kill Avenue, an indoor exhibition at IADT and a finale event in December, asking the community one simple question: did we hear you right?
What We Heard
People want small, obvious, everyday improvements that make it easier to meet each other and find their way around. They asked for clearer entrances, softer edges, more nature, and a sense that their place is looked after. The resulting ideas include heritage screens at Baker's Corner inspired by local seniors' memories, arched entrances at Rose Park drawn from children's ideas of "going somewhere special", and better lighting and playful ground art for St Patrick's Laneway.
What's Next
The Love Our Place Report and Community Design Brief brings everything together into a shared vision and a practical guide for delivery. Phase 4 is where the designs move from paper to pavement. It isn't the end of the road; it's the start of the delivery journey.
Our Partners
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, IADT (MA Design for Change, MA Applied Design and BA Graphic Design), Monkstown Educate Together National School, and, most importantly, the people of Kill O' The Grange.
Love Our Place: Kill O' The Grange, Report & Community Design Brief
This report brings together everything we heard, tested and learned through Love Our Place: Kill O' The Grange. Part A tells the story of the engagement process, from the first knock on the door to the finale event. Part B, the Community Design Brief, turns what the community told us into a shared vision, six core values, and clear design directions for Baker's Corner, Rose Park and St Patrick's Laneway.
It is intended as a practical guide for the next stage of design and delivery, and as a model that other neighbourhoods can learn from.
Love Our Place: IADT Student Exhibition
Love Our Place was shaped by a creative partnership with Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, bringing students from across disciplines into the heart of the project.
Students from the MA Design for Change ran playful workshops with 6th Class pupils from Monkstown Educate Together National School. They turned the children's ideas into design principles and concepts for the three sites, and Applied Design module students developed these into light-touch interventions that could realistically be prototyped. BA Graphic Design students created an umbrella brand for the project. Cadhla Butler's design was chosen as the visual identity of the Community Design Brief.
These boards, first shown at the indoor exhibition at IADT, showcase the students' work alongside drawings from our children's survey.