Cara's, Caherciveen
Bringing a vacant Main Street building back to life
A building with a story to tell
On the Main Street of Caherciveen stands a three-storey terraced building that locals knew for generations as Breen's. A butcher's shop at street level, a home above, and a family who lived over their own business. It is a building type found in every Irish town, and it carries a problem found in every Irish town.
Because the home upstairs was only ever reached through the shop, the two uses were bound together. When retail declined and the shop closed, the home above closed with it. The building has now stood vacant for roughly ten years. Water ingress has damaged the structure, the upper floors have partially collapsed, and without intervention this well-mannered 19th-century building, sitting within Caherciveen's Architectural Conservation Area, was at serious risk of dereliction. And as every town knows, vacancy spreads.
In the middle of a housing crisis, a three-bedroom home sitting empty on a town's Main Street is exactly the problem Ireland needs to solve. Since 2024, we have been working with Skelligs Retreat to solve it here.
The most sustainable building is the one that already exists
Our starting point at Cara's, as on all of our town centre projects, was to retain as much of the existing building as possible. The original 19th-century structure at the front of the site is the most valuable part, both as historic fabric and as a presence on the street, and it will be carefully refurbished with original material retained wherever practicable. A high-accuracy point cloud survey was commissioned to document every original feature before a single wall is touched.
Not everything deserved to stay, and not everything worth keeping was obvious. A series of poor-quality 20th-century extensions to the rear were actively undermining the building's future, and the design removes just 53.5 square metres of this failing fabric, replacing it with 105 square metres of high-quality new construction: a three-storey rear extension, a small retail kiosk, and new facilities serving the yard. But the steel structure spanning the rear yard, easily dismissed as a derelict shed, is retained and given an entirely new purpose. This is circular economy thinking applied to a whole building. Keep what has value, find the value in what others would discard, remove only what is failing, and add only what secures the long life of the rest.
The refurbished building will be retrofitted to a very high energy standard, with improved insulation and airtightness designed around NZEB principles, durable low-maintenance materials, and a loose-fit internal layout that can adapt as residents' needs change. A building that has already served Caherciveen for nearly two centuries is being equipped to serve it for many more.
Unlocking the home above the shop
The key architectural move is a simple one: giving the home its own front door. A new independent entrance is created from the public car park to the rear, with an external stair and passenger lift rising to the residential unit above. The commercial ground floor keeps its traditional entrance on Main Street. For the first time in the building's history, the shop and the home can live and work independently of one another.
The result is a refurbished three-bedroom home of 144 square metres over the first and second floors, with two outdoor terraces, an accessible shower room, and a living room overlooking Main Street that retains the character of the original front rooms. The ground floor becomes a 151.5 square metre restaurant and commercial space with full wheelchair accessibility, opening directly onto the transformed rear yard.
Town Centres First, in practice
Cara's is a direct expression of the Government's Town Centres First policy and the Kerry County Development Plan's ambition to bring vacant buildings back into use and return residents to the upper floors of town centre buildings. The community has been part of the project from the start. At a public consultation evening in Caherciveen Community Centre in October 2024, around thirty members of the community responded to the proposals with enthusiasm, and with offers of collaboration from local wellness practitioners, tour guides, and tourism businesses.
Planning permission has now been granted by Kerry County Council. A building that stood empty for a decade is on its way to becoming a restored home, a working restaurant, and a covered events yard for exhibitions, performance, and public gathering, all within walls and structures the site has held since the 1800s.
A new outdoor room for the town
The most ambitious move in the scheme is at the back of the site. The long rear yard, almost 200 square metres opening onto the public car park, has spent decades hidden under corrugated cladding. Rather than clearing the site, the design retains the existing steel structure and reimagines it as the frame for a generous covered outdoor events space. Held within that retained steel skeleton, the yard takes on real character: an honest, robust space with the patina of its working past, ready for a very different future.
This is a space designed for public life. Exhibitions and performances, markets and food trucks, community gatherings, wellbeing classes, and outdoor dining can all be held here, served by the restaurant from the main building, by the retail kiosk at the rear, and by its own customer facilities. With direct access from the public car park, the yard can operate hand in hand with the restaurant or entirely independently, giving the ground floor offer genuine commercial flexibility and giving Caherciveen a new venue it has never had: a sheltered outdoor room in the heart of the town.
On the street, the proposal gives something back to the conservation area: render in poor condition removed to expose the original stonework with lime pointing, conservation-appropriate timber sash windows, and a new traditional shopfront designed in line with the Kerry County Council Shopfront Design Guide.