Dublin tech company appeals council’s refusal to let it install sleeping pods in its city-centre office building

A Dublin tech company has appealed the council’s refusal to let it install nine sleeping pods in its city-centre offices.

“Everything’s changing,” said Ronan Perceval, CEO of Phorest, and Dublin City Council needs to change with the times.

Since 2003, Phorest has rented an office building on Anglesea Row, off Capel Street, that’s six storeys high. When Covid-19 arrived in Ireland, along with lockdowns, the building cleared out – and working from home took off.

Now many of the company’s roughly 350 employees work from home, in Ireland, and from abroad, Perceval said. So the headquarters building in Dublin’s north inner-city is about 50 percent empty, the company has said, in planning documents.

Perceval wants to bring staff to the HQ for meetings, but finding a hotel nearby is hard, and expensive. So in May the company applied for planning permission to convert one of their empty floors into a place staff could stay overnight for free.

A council planner wrote that “The applicant’s justification scenario is … probably not unique”, but recommended rejecting the application, saying the pods wouldn’t meet housing standards.

Now Phorest has appealed to An Bord Pleanála, show records accessed through Vizlegal.

Councillors say they see what Phorest is trying to do, but that it’s not what the city overall needs.

“I definitely empathise with the CEO and company, said Eoin Hayes, a Social Democrats councillor with long experience in the tech industry. “It’s an effort at creative problem solving, but it’s going against the grain of what we’re trying to do with housing policy.”

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner, one of several who represent the north inner-city, said that allowing sleeping pods would likely be seen as part of a “race to the bottom” in standards.

“I don’t think people would thank us for introducing that,” she said.

The plan

Perceval, Phorest’s CEO, said by phone last Tuesday, 20 August, that he told his wife about the sleeping pods plan “and she was like, What, you want everyone sleeping over at the office? And I’m like, Absolutely not.”

There’s an affordable housing crisis, and a new graduate working for the company in a “support role” can’t afford to live in the city, Perceval  said.

But in the new post-Covid’s-arrival world where working from home is possible and accepted, this grad could live pretty well in, say, Letterkenny, where costs are lower, he said.

In this environment, “We couldn’t get people back into the office if we wanted to,” Perceval said. So it’s about adjusting to this new reality, he said.

And that involves getting staff into the office sometimes for meetings, as teams, Perceval said. “We need people to connect,” he said. “When you’re sitting down, face to face, you can figure it out faster.”

But “To do that now is insanely expensive,” Perceval said.

Hotels nearby are hard to get and might cost €200 a night, he said. So for a four-person team to meet up in person would cost €800, not even counting transport – and across teams and months, that adds up, he said.

Meanwhile, they’ve got empty floors in their office building. And “these idle spaces have become a drain on our company resources”, the company said, in planning documents.

Phorest is in the last “year or two” of a 10-year lease on the building and whether it can get permission for its sleeping pods will figure in whether it wants to stay, or move to another spot, Perceval said.

Phorest’s proposal is to put in nine little rooms – only three with windows – each one with a single bed, and work desk, the company’s planning application says. Plus “associated sanitary and shower facilities”.

“The use of the pods will be intermittent and will generally be for short stay for 1-3 days maximum,” the application says.

Ian McArdle, deputy secretary general of the Communications Workers Union, said on Friday that he’s sceptical of the proposal.

He’s not sure there’s really a need for it at all, he said. “We [the CWU] hold a lot of conferences at our office and we always manage to find hotel rooms for the guests, when we need them,” he said.

But if the company wants to push forward, it should consult with its employees. “If Phorest was a unionised workplace, of course, we’d expect management to come to us with a set of proposals,” he said.

Rejection

A 22 July report from the council’s planning department, says the proposal doesn’t really fit in any available category.

If it was supposed to be regular housing, it’s substandard. If it’s supposed to be co-living it’d be substandard too.

“In relation to the Irish planning context it can be at least ascertained that overnight employee accommodation is sui generis,” a planner wrote.

“No model of use or management plan has been provided by the applicant in regard to the proposal and there is no obvious precedent for same within the city that the planner is aware of,” they wrote.

The conversion of this office space to sleeping pods “would materially contravene” the Dublin City Development Plan, would contravene design standards for new apartments, would “constitute a substandard form of development” and “would set a precedent”, the planner wrote.

The council rejected the application on 17 July.

Councillors don’t evaluate and decide on planning applications, that’s the job of  council planners.

But Hayes, the Social Democrats councillor, and Horner, the Green Party councillor, said Friday they weren’t supportive of the proposal.

“I definitely don’t think we should be setting a standard for converting office space into what is essentially private hotel accommodation,” Hayes said. “In a housing crisis, we need, in particular, more affordable housing for rent and purchase – that’s what’s needed.”

Horner said allowing the pods to be put in on a one-off ad hoc basis would make them hard to regulate. And introducing this as a new type of housing/sleeping arrangement in the city that could be replicated wouldn’t be a popular idea, she said.

“I think  there’d be a lot of resistance to that,” she said. “It would be seen as sort of a race to the bottom on accommodation.”

Appeal

On 14 August, Phorest appealed the council’s rejection to An Bord Pleanála.

The sleeping pods aren’t apartments or co-living and so shouldn’t be evaluated against the standards for those types of development, its appeal says.

“The reference to non-compliance with residential standards misses the whole point of the proposal. People will not be living in this facility,” it says.

“The use of the sleeping accommodation can and will be managed to ensure that the use of the facility is limited to overnight sleeping by staff members only,” the appeal says.

The use of the pods will be restricted to weekdays, and to staff only – not subcontractors or guests of the company, it says.

Ireland-based staff could only use them if they live more than 80 km from the Dublin office and their meeting spans more than one day, the appeal says.

The council could include these kinds of restrictions in official conditions attached to a planning approval, Perceval said.

But if the council approves Phorest’s application for nine sleeping pods, and it uses those in a reasonable, agreed way – doesn’t that still set a precedent that could be exploited by someone unscrupulous?

What is to stop another company from applying for permission to put 20 little windowless sleeping pods in an empty office building and rent them out at €800 a month or something?

“That’s a terrible argument,” Perceval says. “Should we outlaw shops because some people shoplift?”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12.00 on 28 Aug. 2024 to change “the new post-Covid world” to “the new post-Covid’s-arrival world” to reflect that Covid-19 has not gone away. Apologies for the error.