RENTAL HOUSING
Ideas for a new model of rented housing
COMPETITION
Our competition entry for the RIBA housing competition re-thought how a rental housing community might be designed.
The concept for the design was based around residents paying only for the space they needed. The idea of having a spare bedroom is banished, so tenants don’t rent houses larger than they need. The development includes a Community Hotel with rooms for rent at low cost and allowed residents to expand their homes temporarily to accommodate guests.
The scheme creates a wide variety of house types, from small flats to large family homes or single storey dwellings for people who may be less mobile. The aim is to create a genuinely mixed community which can be inhabited by people at all stages of their lives without needing to leave the neighbourhood as circumstances inevitably change.
Each house has a very efficient floor plan and is designed around a compact courtyard garden, terrace or small patio, designed to be inhabited by container planting which can easily be relocated. Creating a dense arrangement of houses with limited outdoor space allowed us to make generous communal gardens, squares and streets, which the houses are arranged to address.
ONE BED GROUND AND FIRST FLOOR PLAN
TWO BED GROUND AND FIRST FLOOR PLAN
THREE BED GROUND FLOOR PLAN
THREE BED FIRST FLOOR PLAN
Parking spaces are discreetly located within buildings or at the edges of the estate , to ensure cars do not dominate the landscape. Spaces are not linked to any individual property, meaning you don’t have to pay for an empty driveway if you don’t own a car. All homes have generous cycle parking.
The material palette is kept deliberately restrained, using brickwork to highlight the sculpted volumes of the buildings, with contrasting metal to form the roofs.
