Cast Corbel House, Norwich

2025 RIBA East Award 

House
Grafted for private client
Contract value: £316,000
GIA: 110m²
Cost per m²: £2,873

As any architect will tell you, securing their first decent project can be difficult. Often it is for their parents, and often takes the form of a rear extension to the family home. 

Both proved true for Nicole Fassihi. She and her partner, Lemma Redda, had set up their practice, Grafted, in 2022. Their Cast Corbel House project involved renovating the ground floor rooms of Fassihi’s parents’ detached Victorian house up to current insulation standards, while also adding a dining-room extension to the kitchen area and revamping the rear garden.

Located on the edge of northern Norwich’s popular ‘Golden Triangle’ district, this modest scheme is notable because it was built as well as designed by the architects. Achieving this required the use of digital fabrication skills that Redda had learned as a postgraduate student at the University of Westminster. Both partners in Grafted thus found that they were working on site in Norwich for over a year, while also juggling their architectural practice and home life back in London.

The quality of design is superb and includes timber cabinetry and furniture made by the practice. However, the real stand-out elements are the red-tinted, cast concrete components on the exterior frieze. Fabricated through computer-aided design and manufacturing using a range of custom-made moulds, these tie the extension beautifully to the existing house, itself of red brick and Victorian masonry detailing. 

There is also a specially crafted open downpipe made of cast elements, with some of its concrete pieces polished to expose the aggregate. Everything the architects undertook on the project is laced with this level of enthusiasm, energy and experimentation.

The project has all the feel of a first commission, with all the promise that contains. The architects admit that now their practice is growing, they cannot spend the same time again working on site. 

Yet what the scheme offers is a model of democratic digital manufacturing – something normally only possible on large expensive buildings – at an ordinary domestic scale. It also shows how younger architects who possess excellent fabrication skills can contribute directly to their own economical and award-winning designs.

View all of our East winners here, and all our RIBA UK Award winners here.

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RIBA UK Awards 2025 sponsored by Autodesk, EH Smith, Equitone and VELUX