Fencing is one of the few elements on a development that touches every part of the site. It runs along the perimeter, frames the entrance, divides the communal from the private, sits beside the landscaping, the cladding, and the paths throughout the development.
It’s a detail that is always visible but sometimes treated as an afterthought. And that sequencing costs more than expected, impacting both the programme and the end result.
Avoid “sorting it out later”, and protect your programme and design intent
On a development of any scale, fencing should not be treated as a standalone element.
- The post centres need to work with the paving grid.
- The finish needs to be chosen alongside the cladding palette.
- The gate positions need to account for swing clearance, planting, service access.
These decisions go beyond just installation details and they’re far easier to get right when the conversation starts early.
“You might get a tender drawing that gives you enough to price, but not enough to build,” says Eoin Ennis, Contracts Manager. “We might get a box section dimension but no wall thickness, or a detail that just won’t work once you’re on site.”
The gap between what’s drawn and what’s buildable, closes quickly when the conversation happens early. It almost never closes cleanly when it doesn’t.
What changes when the conversation happens early
At Brickfield Square in Crumlin, Brian M. Durkan brought in the Irish Fencing team before the detailed design was finalised. Eoin reviewed the brief, walked the site with their team, and suggested base designs and products to work from. The criteria were appearance, safety, minimal maintenance, and value, in that order.
That’s a very different brief to “match what’s on the drawing.”
From there, they submitted drawings showing the variations required across the site, different fixing details for walls, ground conditions, the creche area cantilevered over the car park roof. By the time anything went to tender, the design was already resolved. No value engineering conversations that strip the thing back to something nobody actually wanted.
The same approach shaped the Curam Healthcare project in Carrigaline. Mahon & Fox Architects needed fencing that would hold up under the security requirements of a healthcare setting without undermining what they’d designed above ground.
The answer was a consistent RAL 9005 black finish across a mix of interlaced bow-top railings and high-security mesh, different products doing different jobs, reading as one considered decision.
That only works if someone’s thought it through before the installation schedule is set.
Precision isn’t about measurement
There’s a version of “accurate fabrication” that means hitting the tolerances on a drawing. That matters. But the more useful kind of accuracy is knowing when the drawing is asking for something the site can’t deliver.
At Cairn Homes’ Castletreasure development in Douglas, the schedule was the constraint. Houses were being handed over to owners. The railings had to be right and they had to be in. Solid bar railing to the front garden divides, mounted atop a retaining wall at various levels, two phases, two weeks, no room for a return visit to fix something that was measured wrong.
“The hard work is getting the posts in,” Eoin says. “Once they’re in, the pavers, landscapers and tarmac lads can all move in behind you.”
The bit about craft that doesn’t show up on a drawing
“That took a lot of work, a lot of measuring, a lot of time to perfect,” says Brian Moloney, Production Manager, describing the Claremont gates, a large entrance set with overhead panels and side panels, every bar across every panel needing to line up perfectly across the full assembly. “You could be walking past and it just looks like a gate.” That’s what good fencing does. It disappears into the design. It holds the boundary, frames the entrance, carries the palette through to the edge of the site. When it’s resolved early it becomes part of the architecture. When it’s left late it sits next to it.
A practical suggestion
Next time you’re in early design development, the stage where you’re still working out the material palette, the site levels, the approach to boundaries, send us the drawings. Not for pricing, but we’ll have a quick chat about what’s possible, what the constraints are, and where fencing decisions made now will make the rest easier later.
We’re sound. We walk every site. We ask questions that may suggest something that works better than what was drawn.
On another project, Dodder Greenway in Donnybrook, the original detail had the mesh fencing embedded in a concrete plinth poured from both sides, unbuildable given site access. A bolted angle fixed to the top of the plinth solved it, worked better structurally, and kept the installation clean.
That conversation costs nothing. Leaving it until tender stage usually does.