OPINION: Why this is the nicest housing estate in County Kildare

The Lakelands housing estate in Naas must - all things considered - be the most beautiful housing estate in County Kildare.

With its sloping roofs, open plan front gardens and garages jutting out the front, the homes look like a residential development you’d expect to see in New England, or some other opulent location in the eastern United States.

The houses were built by Clane resident and County Kerry native John O’Connell Snr, whose strong reputation as a house builder was only enhanced as he built other estates in the area, like Sundays Well and the various iterations of Craddockstown on a swathe of land that edges towards west Wicklow from east Kildare.

The homes were constructed in the mid-1970s and are mainly semi detached, but there are a few detached units.

The area could be described as solidly middle class and while swankier and newer houses have since been built all over Naas and other County Kildare towns, they’ve had the better part of four or five decades to put it up to Lakelands.

More than a few gardaí have lived there and still do, including a former commissioner; a point only relevant, if at all, because they have a reputation for not kicking too many wides on the residential property field.

The houses are spacious, typically with four decent-sized bedrooms and the aforementioned garages structure have the additional benefit of dual star status - because they can be readily converted to another room. Historically this could be done at relatively little cost both financially and in terms of sacrificing hardly any of the overall site size.

A fifth bedroom can be created without losing a square inch of the front or back gardens.

But the real beauty of Lakelands is outside the front door.

It has its own lake, one of three inter-connected bodies of water in that part of town.

There are swans, ducks, herons, water hens as well as an established walking route and seating on two of the lakes which lie just across the road.

The open green spaces on either side of the only road into the estate are like prairies compared to what has been provided elsewhere.

The pedestrian traffic moving through en route to Sundays Well, Lacken View, Cleevaun or Craddockstown is hardly noticeable given the significant green expanse.

It is an example of how people can be encouraged to walk and cycle from one residential setting to another destination. (Though this is often controversial because residents with less space have rightly opposed the concept of permeability, as Kildare County Council call it, because they fear it will facilitate anti-social behaviour).

Those passing through Lakelands are generally unobtrusive; like ghosts on a landscape.

The estate is also close to the town. Not an estate agent’s classification of close proximity, but genuinely only minutes away. Even the footpath to the town centre via Fairgreen is flanked by green space before you encounter traffic.

As more and more homes are built in ever more cramped spaces in Naas and elsewhere, we’re told by the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael government to be oh so grateful that it’s woken up to its own housing crisis and tells Kildare County Council to address it with shoe boxes, inadequate parking places and not enough amenity space.

If it's possible for bricks and mortar to be emotionally rich, it's a description for Lakelands.

We won’t be seeing any more places like it, not unless you work for Eli Lilly or Google and have the resources to start all over again.

And we’re all the poorer for that.

Lakelands is something more than an address for those who live there. It’s a template for how places to live should be created.