Truly workable spaces and considered design and composition
Levitt Bernstein for East Thames Housing Group
Contract value: £14m
GIA: 4,800 m²
Cost per m²: £2,917
This row of houses had to be bold and beautiful to respond to its immediate industrial context – but sensitive enough to work with the smaller, terraced, period houses behind. Landscape is crucial in unifying the scheme: a large courtyard sits between a terrace of mews houses clad in red corrugated metal opposite brick apartment blocks with distinctive, irregular saw-toothed roofs.
This roofscape adds interest to the street frontage and helps break down the continual mass. All homes – whether one or two-bedroom apartments or three-bedroom mews houses – are dual aspect with truly workable spaces and considered design and composition. The quality of the external brickwork, metalwork and detailing adds to the success of this scheme. Open air stairs and cores have been integrated well behind the punctuated brick facade. This is genuinely affordable London housing which also manages to be delightful and generous in size.
See other winners in the RIBA regional awards - London: Residential