International Rugby Experience

This €10 million international rugby experience museum is one of the most exciting projects ever to be proposed for Limerick City. The 2,250m2, seven storey building will feature state-of-the-art interactive exhibitions and is located on Limerick’s O’Connell Street just at the edge of a Georgian conservation area, spanning across three buildings. The building is designed to provide a new cultural attraction for international rugby fans and visitors and is being led by Irish rugby legend Paul O’Connell and funded by JP McManus. The International Rugby Experience is a world class visitor centre in the heart of Limerick City with market-leading architectural work by the world-renowned Niall McLaughlin Architects and in June 2023, won first prize in the Public Choice for the Cultural and Public Buildings category of the Annual RIAI Awards. The project is also shortlisted for the Cultural Project Award under the 2023 Schuco Excellence Awards.

We worked closely with the design team in Niall McLaughlin Architects to design and provide all internal steel glazed screens and doors offering impressive heights of 3 metres allowing for a massive expanse of glass and light in the building, both fire and non-fire rated with beautifully slim steel frames in a combination of EI30 and EI60 integrity and insulation fire protection. The slim steel profiles of the glazed doors and screens throughout the building, in an unusual olive green powder coated finish, offer a beautiful contrast to the surrounding exposed brickwork and are installed in both single and double size variations with integrated access control and hardware. We provided an electronic locking with security fob access system to control staff and visitor access to various areas within the building. Around the lift core areas we also provided a range of concealed frame steel riser doors, some of which are hidden behind large olive green steel doors that sit neatly into recessed walls in the many hallways of the building. Similarly in the exhibition halls we installed a series of narrow concealed riser doors that have been used to display paragraphs of text as part of the exhibition. In the interactive, physical demonstration area of the museum we provided a series of standard height and double height glazed screens, and glazed doors leading into a large area where visitors can put their own skills to the test and work with the exhibition team to try out different exercises and drills that are associated with Rugby training.

Upon entering the building you are greeted with an impressive double height entrance lobby with a dramatic light fixture overhead. This immediate introduction to the red brick walls and similarly red-tiled floors is beautifully interrupted by the olive green glazed screens and doors, and non-glazed steel and riser doors. The main exhibition begins in a narrow corridor, designed to replicate a pre-match changing room with sound effects echoing the cheers of crowds in a stadium. Visitors wait in the ranks here while a countdown style tribute video to the history of rugby is projected onto one of our excessive height olive green steel doors which we automated to dramatically open into the next stage of the experience when the countdown is complete.

Visitors are then brought through 6 floors of the museum experience finishing on the rooftop floor that majestically overlooks all of Limerick city. The top floor is an open, public hall featuring a stunning combination of dramatically tall and arched ceilings supported by exposed brick walls which are interrupted by full height glazed panels giving a 360 view of the cityscape below. The same olive green steel doors sit open within panels of the same finish to allow visitors to move easily into and out of the final exhibition space. Part of the exhibition text appears written on the overclad walls of a larger central column in this room which conceal riser cupboards. Above this central column sits a sort of mezzanine, sub-level, accessible only by service personnel but cleverly disguised by two bespoke KCC glazed screen enclosures, featuring an unusual mesh design visible through the glass, which stand like two impressive, backlit pillars reaching up to the impressive arched ceilings. The Architect wanted these to be visible from anywhere in the surrounding city.

We were thrilled to be involved in this prestigious, iconic and eagerly anticipated project in the heart of Limerick city. It was not without its challenges and we worked closely with the onsite team in Flynn’s to coordinate and install the vast number of excessively tall and heavy steel doors and glazed screens across the 6 floors.

The logistics of distributing frames, doors and glass to the various floor levels proved to be the biggest obstacle we would face on the project. There was only two accessible floors for loading the materials on and they were the ground and second floors as the façade had been closed in prior to our commencement on site.