Heart Of Glass: First Look Inside Dublin's €3.5B Glass Bottle Megascheme

For over two decades, the enormous Glass Bottle site in Dublin was emblematic of the Celtic Tiger’s boom-era excess and bust-era stasis — the modern city in a grain of sand. 

Now, with tenants finally residing in the first residential building, it stands as a testing ground for Dublin’s ability to deliver massive urban transformation on a scale successfully achieved in other European cities.

And it truly is one of the largest single developments ongoing in Europe. When completed, the 37-acre Glass Bottle development will deliver as many as 4,000 rental homes plus more than 1M SF of commercial space, including offices, retail, wellness, cultural and community uses, a hotel and public realm — effectively creating a new coastal district for Dublin, valued at more than €3.5B.

With the first residential block complete and further buildings in construction, Bisnow visited the site with Ronan Group Chief Investment Officer Aidan Gavin for an exclusive look at how the project is shaping up.

“A lot of international staff have a choice about where they locate in Europe, and when we are talking to the major global employers, they say that Dublin is an important attraction to young professionals, who can live, work and spend their leisure time in a really vibrant but compact and well-connected city,” Gavin said of the scheme's target audience.

It is impossible to consider the current project without revisiting the site's history. Its origins are in the glass manufacturing industry from which it takes its name and date back to the late 19th century, with the formal establishment of the Irish Glass Bottle Cos. plant in 1871.

For more than a century, it produced bottles for Ireland’s breweries and export markets, eventually closing in 2002 and leaving behind a brownfield site adjacent to the port and close to the city centre.

What followed was one of the most notorious land deals of the Celtic Tiger era. In 2006, at the peak of the market, a consortium led by developer Bernard McNamara, alongside financier Derek Quinlan and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, paid €412M with ambitions to deliver a major mixed-use scheme including housing and offices in a new urban quarter connected to the fledgling Docklands expansion.

However, the timing could hardly have been worse. 

When the Global Financial Crisis hit, the deal unravelled and the site became effectively stranded amid a real estate market collapse that wiped billions of euros off Irish land values.

By 2011, land that had cost more than €400M was worth little more than a tenth of that, and the site eventually made its way into Ireland's “bad bank,” the National Asset Management Agency, when loans used to buy it were transferred to the agency in 2012.

It then sat largely idle for years, embodying unrealised potential and a political headache that lingered long after the Docklands authority itself was wound up.

The reset came in stages. NAMA sold its initial majority stake in 2020 in a deal that valued the site at around €200M. It sold its final 20% shareholding in June 2023, leaving the way open for the transformation of what is the Poolbeg West Strategic Development Zone by development vehicle Pembroke Beach, a consortium featuring U.S. private equity giant Oaktree, Ronan Group Real Estate and Lioncor, the Irish development arm of Oaktree. 

The site is positioned between the Docklands and Dublin Bay, adjacent to some of the most valuable commercial real estate in the country in the Silicon Docks cluster, with a mix of private, social and affordable housing all for rent and an emphasis on amenities, connectivity and sustainability.

The buildings are designed to exceed nearly zero energy standards and integrate into Dublin’s district heating system, powered by the nearby incinerator.

The consortium broke the scheme into multiple stages, and construction began in earnest in the early 2020s, with the first residential building, Lime House, comprising 212 apartments. It reached completion in late 2025 and is currently around half full, with initial lettings especially popular among Google and Meta employees.

Apartment asking rents are around €2,500 for a one-bed unit, rising to €3,000 and above for a two-bed unit and €4,000 and above for a larger three-bed unit.

“The site is only a 15-minute walk from Google’s offices, and so initial lettings have been very popular with the company’s employees," Gavin said. 

Each residential block will be pitched slightly differently in terms of amenities, but the emphasis is on possession-light city living, right down to a vending machine that allows tenants to rent everything from an iron to a vacuum cleaner, plus subsidised sweets.

“You can see the lifestyle of the early tenants in the fact that demand for the parking spaces available for Lime House is actually below allocation, but the car rental over the road has done really good business,” Gavin said.

More completions are following quickly. Additional buildings delivering 675 homes will be finished in 2026. Further phases, including another 586 homes, are due to commence construction as well this year. 

In early 2026, the project secured a €415M refinancing deal with Deutsche Bank, replacing previous lending structures and effectively resetting the capital stack for the next phase of delivery. On completion, Ronan estimates the gross development value will be in the region of €3.5B to €4B.

It was reported last month that apartments at the scheme could be part of a £1.2B rented residential initial public offering being planned by Oaktree, which would combine some of its UK and Irish build-to-rent assets. 

Planning permission has also been granted for a 228-room, 20-storey hotel, while the 1M SF of commercial space will be divided among uses, with a degree of flexibility in terms of real estate asset types as the project evolves, Gavin said, and largely sitting on the site’s perimeter closest to the port.

There is still a lot of development to come, but the scheme’s evolution has taken what was once an empty symbol of overreach and recast it as a cornerstone of Dublin’s housing delivery strategy.

Unless the port is ever persuaded to relocate — a dream of company founder Johnny Ronan — the city is unlikely to see another brownfield development of this scale.

For now, the cranes are up and the site is bustling and busy, the first tenants are in, and this long-stalled location at the edge of Dublin Bay is, finally, beginning to showcase Dublin's future through the looking glass.