• 19 Nov 2025

RIAI Bookshop – our Christmas gift guide is here

The season's here, and so is our Christmas Gift Guide

The RIAI Bookshop is the ultimate destination for design enthusiasts this festive season. Located at 8 Merrion Square, Dublin, the RIAI Bookshop is Ireland’s only architecture and design bookshop, offering an extensive range of titles on architecture, interiors, urban planning, and landscape design. It also features Irish-interest books, children’s architecture titles, and limited-edition art prints from the RIAI Murray Collection.

With an array of options for design enthusiasts, homeowners and children alike, there really is something for everyone. Pop in store and explore the wide selection of books. This year’s Christmas card range features new cards by Other Routes Design.

Open to everyone from 9.00am - 5.00pm (Monday - Friday) for in-person shopping. You can also order online by contacting bookshop manager Clodagh McKenna. The RIAI Bookshop team will be delighted to help you find the perfect Christmas gift this holiday season.

Below are some examples of what is on offer in the RIAI Bookshop:     

Designing Christmas Practical Tips for Festive Décor

By Laura Dowling

It offers innovative ideas and step-by-step tutorials for creating a beautiful Christmas at home, drawing inspiration from Paris, her experience as White House floral designer, and nature. She provides practical tips on how to incorporate holiday decor in phases using 10 favourite elements and showcasing 10 different design schemes, including a vintage Parisian theme and an Italian-style motif.

€36.00

Approximate Formality - Morphology of Irish Towns

By Valerie Mulvin FRIAI, RIAI Member and founder of Dublin based practice McCullough Mulvin Architects.

The book features towns and town plans in Ireland – from earliest times to the Famine – their origin, originality and potential – bringing their rigorous and axial layouts to an audience for the first time where they can be understood as a part of world culture. The book is illustrated with new plans, maps and images, many of which are being published in Ireland for the first time.

                                                                   €35.00

ArchiTek

By Dominique Ehrhard

This childrens book is a combination of instructions with illustrations and behind that puzzle pieces. The instructions are printed on nice heavy paper while the puzzle pieces are thicker cardboard to carefully be popped out. This is the perfect gift if you have a creative child.

€35.00

The Environmental Design Pocketbook The Second Edition

By Sofie Pelsmakers

It places the information you need for sustainable, low energy building design at your fingertips. Whether used in the classroom, office or on-site, the book guides the designer through the entire process; from the fundamentals to the building details.

€38.50

Make the Home you Love

Fiona McPhillips

After completing her own home renovation and extension, Fiona McPhillips, author, journalist and interiors fanatic, was inspired to bring together everything she learned along the way. In collaboration with three award-winning architects, Fiona provides you with the most holistic approach to your design and build.

€25.00

Carlo Scarpa and Castelvecchio Revisited

By Richard Murphy

This book analyses not just Scarpa’s work as we find it today, and in great detail, but also introduces the reader to the complex history of the building as well as sequences of Scarpa’s own highly revealing drawings; witnesses to a brilliant curiosity and holistic approach to design where the art and architecture are completely complimentary. Richard Murphy’s great admiration for Scarpa has produced a daunting, but impressive, volume.

€89.50

Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe

By Steve W. Hurtt and James T. Tice

This book provides a window to explore past, present and future themes central to the discipline of urban design as seen through the critical lens of Colin Rowe and those who continue to define their creative work in relationship to that extraordinary intellect. It describes the ideas developed and described primarily by Colin Rowe.

€66.00

Dublin’s Stained Glass A guide to the finest twentieth century windows

By David Caron

It features thirty-eight sites which contain collections of the finest and most interesting - and in several instances, little known - twentieth-century stained glass in Dublin city and county; the majority of the windows were made at studios in the capital, and by such internationally lauded artists as Harry Clarke, Wilhelmina Geddes, Michael Healy, Evie Hone and Richard King.

€30.00

More Space for Architecture - The Work of O’Donnell + Tuomey

The book features buildings and projects designed by Sheila O’Donnell FRIAI and John Tuomey FRIAI over the seven-year period from 2015 to 2021. The book also features a collection of reflective essays by the architects, which include a selection of O’Donnell’s characteristic watercolour studies, expanding on ideas aired in public lectures and developed in studio conversations.

€45.00

Irish Cities in Crisis 

Edited by David Browne FRIAI, Jim Coady FRIAI and Dr Carole Pollard FRIAI, and published by the RIAI

The most comprehensive book on Irish cities to-date. It spans 678 pages of content by 29 contributors and includes case studies and examples of projects on successful European cities. The book, whilst calling out deficits in current city planning, discusses and offers solutions and initiatives to meet the challenges we are currently facing in our cities. It champions collaboration between civil society and local, regional and state governments to bring about change.

                                                                  €40.00

RIAI Murray Collection 

A special treat for Architecture aficionados is the limited edition RIAI Murray Collection print series. The Murray Collection contains approximately 1,230 Architectural drawings spanning 160 years, and was presented to the RIAI by Albert Murray in 1923.This limited-edition series features four buildings from the collection (150 prints each): Armagh Courthouse, Armagh by Francis Johnston (1805); Kings Inns, Dublin by James Gandon (1800); Town Hall, Cork by Murray & Denny (1851); and The GPO, Dublin by Francis Johnston (1814-1825). The original artworks are reproduced in beautiful, high-quality lithographic art prints, and are available for purchase from the RIAI Bookshop.

                                                                   €175.00

About the RIAI

Founded in 1839, the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland supports and regulates the architectural profession and promotes the value that architecture brings to society for everyone’s benefit.

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