Permission granted for a new shopfront and signage at Doom Pizza, Capel Street

Dublin City Council has granted permission for alterations to the shopfront and new signage at Doom Pizza, at the corner of Capel Street and Upper Abbey Street in Dublin 1.

The premises sits within the Capel Street Architectural Conservation Area, a designation that asks new work to respect the established character of the street. The challenge was to give a design-led business a shopfront with real presence without that presence coming at the expense of the streetscape. Our in-house design studio, Vico Group, prepared the drawing package: new steel-finish doors and bi-fold aluminium windows, the shopfront repainted, and the existing cluster of projecting letters and fascia signage stripped back to a single hand-painted sign in white on blue. We lodged the application in May, the Council notified its decision to grant in July, and the final grant of permission issued on 6 August 2026.

Shopfronts in conservation areas are often assumed to be a contest between modern branding and historic fabric. In our experience they rarely are, but neither is there a formula — what suits one building and one street will not suit the next, and the design has to be worked out against the particular context it sits in. If you are planning a new shopfront or signage in a sensitive location, we would be glad to talk it through.