Until about 10 years ago, apartment living was an entirely alien concept in Ireland. There were bedsits, of course, and a certain number of flats, both usually carved out of old houses which had become too big and too expensive for single-family occupancy.
And both were temporary dwellings, certainly not intended as permanent homes but as places where people - almost invariably young - could live until they bought houses.
When the time came to buy, houses were the only credible option; a flat would never be given serious consideration.
Then came the boom and while flats all but disappeared, apartments began to appear in steadily larger numbers. By the mid-1990s, more than 5,000 apartments were being built annually in Ireland; last year the figure was 5,709.
Of this total, well over 3,000 each year are in Dublin but the figure for the capital is likely to be much higher this year because work was begun on approximately 2,250 apartments between last January and May. There are still five times as many houses built as apartments but as land becomes scarcer and more expensive, the latter will increasingly be seen as the only realistic means of meeting the demands of aspiring home-owners.
However, before this can happen, a problem of perception needs to be acknowledged and addressed. The problem is that house ownership remains the Irish ideal.
A house, no matter how poorly designed or located, is regarded as preferable to an apartment which, despite the change of name, continues in the popular imagination to be just a flat.
Despite their growing numbers, apartments are more often than not places of transition, a situation encouraged in recent years by many new owners buying properties as rental investments. And because of the explosion in demand for accommodation, apartments tend to be let for short periods only, further discouraging the idea that they could provide permanent homes.
This perception has inevitably had an impact on the quality of apartment building design. After all, if an owner does not intend to live in the property but only offer it on the rental market, the apartment's appearance will be of relatively little importance.
"The problem with apartment design is that it has been done for the wrong reasons - for tax," explains architect Hugh Wallace. "Apartment living has not been seen as a realistic alternative to owning a house, so today it's either an investment or a stepping stone on the way to a property with a garden."
According to another architect, Niall McCullough, "there's a general public feeling that these are all shoe boxes and people are bored by them.
"The initial mass market stuff was really pretty terrible," says architect Derek Tynan, citing the redevelopment of Dublin's quays and sections of the capital's northside as being a particularly squandered opportunity.
While the exterior of most new apartment blocks inclines towards the uninspired - high, flat walls of red brick broken only by lines of identical aluminium-frame windows and small, often inaccessible, balconies - their interiors are where the most serious design problems can be found.
Running off what architect Mary Donohoe describes as "dreary, long corridors" the internal layout of each unit will be determined by two factors. One is the necessity to conform to building legislation, such as the statutory minimum ceiling height of 8ft which means ceilings are almost never any higher, and the requirement for internal fire doors.
The other powerful influence on apartment design once again reflects the Irish preoccupation with houses as an ideal. Accordingly, each unit will be planned to look as though it were a house as much as possible, albeit somewhat smaller than the average and stacked on top of several other properties.
The living room will have a fireplace, cornices and skirting, there will be a hallway, a kitchen, bathroom and ideally at least two bedrooms.
Possession of more than one bedroom is perceived to enhance the commercial value of a property, which means that the rooms in many new apartments are absurdly small.
In the much-heralded Millennium Tower on Dublin's Charlotte Quay Dock, for example, the layout of apartments shows none of the verve and imagination evident on the building's exterior. Instead, the ceilings are barely more than the required minimum and the insistence on more than one bedroom has left some of these spaces barely 8 1/2ft wide.
"Most of the apartments built in the last few years are like the office blocks of the 1970s," Mary Donohoe comments. "There's a lot of short-term thinking around - it's all about profits and short-term returns." Developers rarely spend much on the design or fit-out of apartments and use the most inexpensive materials for this purpose, which leave many units looking flimsy and liable to need refurbishment in a very short time. However since so many apartments are bought either as an investment or as a stop-gap before their owners move on to the purchase of a house, this has not been seen as a problem.
Over the next decade many of these poorly constructed buildings will start to show evidence of dilapidation, the tax incentives which helped encourage their development will have expired and the original owners will have seen a return on their investment. The result will be a lot of bad building stock coming on the market but unable to find buyers.
The notion that apartments are inferior to houses will, therefore, be proven correct.
"Bad design today will lead to future problems," Hugh Wallace agrees. "Far too many new apartments are only suitable for living in as temporary accommodation."
Need this be the case? Irish architects cite the policies of Temple Bar Properties in Dublin as offering an alternative view of apartment design, as this authority made a point of commissioning high-quality buildings which could be seen as providing their owners with a long-term home.
"The mistake has been to think the problems with apartments have to do with space issues," insists Niall McCullough. "It's actually about quality of design and layout."
He believes that, as urban sites become rarer, awareness of the merits of good design - not least in terms of investment return - will become more widely appreciated.
Mr Wallace believes that "design has a long social responsibility and I don't think that has been seen or understood in this country. Building an apartment is not like a fit-out; this is meant to provide a permanent home." There is a consensus that the quality of Irish apartments has recently begun to show improvement and that future developments will have a long-term lifespan. In the meantime, however, there remain many apartment blocks built during the 1990s which risk becoming the slums of the 21st century.