Shortlisted Housing Design Awards schemes in the spotlight

Our Placemaking Director Amanda Taylor and Sustainability Director Paul Miller review this year’s shortlisted ‘Housing Design Awards‘ schemes. Read on to find out their ‘ones to watch’…

As part of Green Week, I recently reviewed this year’s Housing Design Awards shortlist with colleagues while our Sustainability Director Paul Miller scrutinised their environmental credentials.

In selecting schemes to review, I looked for references to context, density, innovation, attention to detail in the public realm and strategies to reduce the impact of parking in new neighbourhoods. Nash Partnership is based in the south west, so shortlisted projects outside of London are more relevant to our work.

As a Building for Nature Assessor, I’m keen to explore how green and blue infrastructure is integrated into layouts and how sustainability principles influence detail and form. We looked for projects with strategies that go beyond Building Regulations, reflecting good practice principles such as form factor; buildings which are strange shapes or feature lots of ‘innies and outies’, which can be hard to detail, we review with a critical eye.

Four themes emerged from my selection this year, which are relevant to our work:

• Prefabrication
• Pragmatic parking
• Mixed-use
• Regeneration or refurbishment

It’s fun to see what the ‘archi’ trend is today:

• Arches: whatever the scale of the building. We were struck by Manchester’s Cottonopolis, a mill aesthetic on a massive scale.
• Colour: in previous years we’ve seen bronze or grey, but this year it’s green – in windows, railings, doors, and balconies. With arches, insets, deck access and features in green, we admired this calming quad by Fraser Brown MacKenna.
• Brick: always popular – used in chamfered reveals, projections, and patterns. On this project, Re-Format make playful patterns in brick whilst referencing local Victorian gable design.
• Cantilevered balconies: such as Burridge Gardens or Hollandbury House (hold onto your washing!).

The Housing Design Awards continue to provide me with a valued source of inspiration and interest. The inclusion of links to the planning portal and DAS documents is a welcome addition to the website for background research. It provides precedents of innovative ideas, inspiration, neighbourhoods and designs which occasionally challenge the norm. These have proved to be invaluable when it comes to planning and highway discussions.

Here are my predictions of ‘ones to watch’ at the Housing Design Awards:

Prefabrication

1. Beechwood Village by PTE is an efficient masterplan delivering 251 two-three storey homes in Basildon. The parking strategy, providing 565 spaces, is integral to the house types. This modular development is interesting because it also provided resident customisation. At Nash Partnership, we delivered a similar project in Basingstoke in 2014 for ZeroC called ‘Design your Home’. A hybrid planning application and design code established the principles. Residents were then able to ‘design’ their homes via an online tool, selecting layout variations and external finishes from an approved range. The result is a lively streetscape of complementary homes. The project also features some quirky roofs and unusual three-storey end types.

   

2. The Alkerden Gateway project by BPTW at Ebbsfleet garden city is another customisation project. Its 67 custom build homes have been completed and feature a range of materials and patterns that celebrate the vernacular of Kent. Customisation includes a range of sustainability features such as water recycling or PVs. Accommodating parking is a homeowner choice, opting to have more storage and fewer cars. This is a concept that would be difficult to get approved in our region, given the strict parking standards and requirements imposed by the local authorities we deal with.

Pragmatic parking

1. The Hill Rise scheme in Woodstock by PTE for 180 homes is similar in size and density (38dw/ha) to many of our Nash projects. It is distinctive because the client wanted to challenge the need for car-dominated suburbs. It features shared gardens called ‘green living rooms’, remote courtyard parking and pedestrian-/cycle-only lanes. Driven by standards and adoption requirements, car parking can take up to 40% of residential development. At Hill Rise it’s closer to 14% with 103 parking spaces for 48 homes, of which 17% are on plot and 40% are in streets/parking squares. This enabled housing density to increase and hard surfaces to reduce, creating more space for people and planting. Parking standards, vehicle charging, bin carry distances and refuse strategies frequently dictate the design of new neighbourhoods. We welcome this innovative approach and hope that councillors, developers and highway authorities can see the added value.
2. The look of this project in Guildford has hints of Goldsmith Street, with terraces and end corner turning apartments. It’s a compact street layout using various types of terraced houses to accommodate a range of parking solutions. The parking standards (less than 1 per dwelling) are lower than those we typically grapple with, but the on-street or on-plot solutions mean cars will not dominate the neighbourhood and facilitate 36 dw/Ha two-three storeys to Passihaus standards.

Mixed use

1. The site of this modest project was a former garden centre in the small village of Henbury.  It provides 14 new homes designed by Ollier Smurthwaite Architects as a farmstead cluster adjacent to a barn-like flexible workspace and farm shop. Access to nature, community and recreation are key themes. Amenities to encourage self-sufficiency and a green way of living are provided such as a large communal kitchen garden, orchard, community green and wildflower meadow.

Regeneration or refurbishment

1. The embodied carbon principles and engagement behind the Energiesprong whole house retrofit by Studio Partington in Nottingham are admirable. We were encouraged to see this shortlisted because Nash Partnership is undertaking similar refurbishment projects involving affordable homes across the south west.
2. We think the Palace Fields project in Runcorn is one to watch and a potential future award winner by DK-Architects. The submission features the first phase of a much wider estate regeneration project at Hallwood Park and Palace Fields aims to fix many of the inherent problems of a Radburn layout, without wholescale demolition. The proposed new local centre features 134 homes, a new church, community centre and commercial units, converting listed buildings and making improvement to the public realm.

Others worth a mention:

1. We admire the scale and ambition of Lightbody Street by Tim Groom Architects to provide 195 affordable homes on a constrained site in Liverpool docklands. It’s part of an exciting future regeneration strategy called ‘Ten Streets’, which aims to nurture the existing maritime and industrial heritage of the area in relation to the city’s World Heritage status.
2. Working with the South Downs National Park Authority, Re-Format have designed a landscape-led retirement village on a greenfield site which has a suburban context and a rural edge. Here, 97 new homes will be provided in a combination of apartment buildings, chalets and bungalows. The buildings are carefully positioned to frame views through the site to the countryside. Clever back-to-back L shaped bungalows (a typology we’ve used previously at Nash on infill regeneration sites) along the rural edge create an attractive fence-free landscape.
3. The Phoenix project on a brownfield site in Lewes will provide over 700 new homes. It features 18 different housing blocks designed by 12 different architects and an epic 300+ page DAS. Ash Sakula Architects have designed the first phase of 44 maisonettes around a shared courtyard garden. Their trademark staircases to upper floor maisonettes enable individual homes to have a front door. M(4)2, we ask? Designed with naughty ‘innies and outies’ at roof level, we like that the elevations are full of character and colour.

Thanks for the inspiration. Keep up the good work, David and team at the Housing Design Awards, and ‘good luck’ to those shortlisted this year. We can’t wait to see which schemes take home a trophy.

– By Amanda Taylor (Director of Placemaking, Nash Partnership)