LIFE AT THE TOP

THE art of apartment living. . . will we take to it? Consider the images set in concrete from all those Continental movies we've watched over the years: laundry strung out between buildings, buckets of water being dispensed with great vigour through open windows, neighbours shouting from one building to another or leaning buxomly from fourth storey windows to greet suitors down below at street level.

Mama mia!

You have to wonder. Yes, more and more apartments are available as young people reclaim the inner city. But there is yet to be a neighbourhood jewel to these places. Foreign accommodation hunters must get confused. The pocket guide to English would suggest that the word "flat" and "apartment" are interchangeable but experienced, Irish home hunters know the difference. If it's a flat, there's a good chance that swirly carpets, creative partitions and New World cookers are involved. An apartment (once called luxury apartments before we all knew better) has the promise of a well appointed couple of rooms in a smart, purpose built block in the centre of the city and the rent is higher.

Tax breaks and designated status have meant a huge surge in apartment building in all Irish cities. In 1995, 40 per cent of all new homes built in Dublin were apartments and in the past five years 15,000 people have moved into city centre apartments. Figures like these would seem to suggest we're edging towards what is the norm for European, big city living and away from the long cherished ideal of owning your house with its own back door.

That's the theory, anyway, hut the figures tell a slightly different story when you break them down.

ACCORDING to Ken McDonald of Hooke McDonald auctioneers, eight out of every 10 of the new urban pioneers in Dublin are either single people or couples. The reason for this is simple and has little to do with demographics - the tax driven, post 1992 apartment schemes are mostly made up of one bedroom units. Two bedroom units are rare and three bedroom apartments even rarer still. Space is at such a premium in the tax driven schemes that storage is limited or non existent. It's as if the first wave of apartments were designed for a transient, young population and not as permanent life long homes and certainly not for families. The interiors of most of these new apartments suggest that maybe we're not ready for fully fledged apartment living. Developers must have a sound commercial reason why they fill their new schemes with dado rails, corniches, and even Adam style marble fireplaces.

A Rear Window style, roof top peep into city centre apartments reveals rooms that look like any suburban interior. Over stuffed sofas wedged into tiny living rooms, shin grazing coffee tables, huge pelmets and yards of curtaining showing perhaps that the owners really do aspire to that semi in suburbia and not the potential Bohemia of the city centre.

The new trend in apartment building is for large, expensive, suburban developments. Even these high price homes have an extraordinary number of reproduction Victorian features - as if the new owners are in denial that they live in a new apartment. However, for all their aesthetic and storage shortcomings, these apartments have a greater chance of becoming someone's life long home. They tend to be bigger with landscaped surroundings mini houses in fact the odd one even has a bit of grass to mow.