St Jame’s Place East

This proposal brings forward a high-quality mixed-use development across two adjoining sites to the rear of Mount Street Upper, addressing James Place East. The scheme adopts a conservation-led approach, delivering meaningful heritage gains and mitigating the long-term erosion of the area’s historic character. The architectural strategy reinforces legibility and introduces a development of appropriate scale and presence within a sensitive urban setting.

A central ambition is the repair and redefinition of the Georgian plot and garden structure that once shaped the area but has since become fragmented and obscured. The reinstatement of this underlying grain informs spatial organisation, massing and façade expression, allowing the scheme to reconnect with the historic logic of the place while accommodating contemporary use.

The scheme mediates between the contrasting scales of its context: the dominant mass of the 10-storey Miesian Plaza, the large-scale contemporary interventions of the ESB Headquarters and Connaught House, and the finer-grained domestic scale of the Georgian terrace along Mount Street Upper. The proposed buildings are composed to create a graduated transition in height and massing, achieving a more coherent and balanced townscape.