Smith Young Architects wins a RIBA North West Award, and Building and Small Project of the Year, for this bold, contemporary yet modest family home that delights with its clever details
2025 RIBA North West Award
2025 RIBA North West Building of the Year sponsored by EH Smith
2025 RIBA North West Small Project of the Year
House
Smith Young Architects for private client
Contract value: Confidential
GIA: 232 m2
Vestige is a modest, discreet, beautifully crafted family home cleverly inserted into a typical Edwardian Street, a building which enriches the clients’ lives and exceeds expectations.
Approaching along a busy, unremarkable suburban street, you could easily miss this four-bedroom house. Not because it ‘fits in’ – it is overtly contemporary in its composition – but because it carefully matches scale, massing, building lines and material tone with its neighbours.
Once noticed, the subtle interplays of solid and void, of rendered ground floor and timber box above, delight with clever details. The parapet of the timber upper storey has a feathered edge with alternate boards projecting above the mass of the building to create a soft junction with the sky. The solid base of the ground floor is in rough-rendered bricks salvaged from a smaller house that used to sit on the site. The original foundations of this building were also reused, reducing the carbon footprint and saving money.
The rooms are well-proportioned, and the overall layout carefully devised to achieve a greater sense of space and contain a wide range of experiences, belying the building’s size. From the double-height toplit entrance hall, wide enough to accommodate a bench to sit on when putting on your shoes, to the timber-lined stair detailed with all the care of a jewellery box, there is a surprise around every corner.
Jury members were pleasantly taken aback by the courtyard garden that is hidden behind a wall and fence to the front of the house. Opening out from a living room, its design mitigates the impact of the busy road: it is concealed until you enter the room, turning what might typically have been just a larger driveway into a positive addition to the living space.
As you move from the hall towards the rear of the house, you walk down over two solid timber steps flanked with a slatted timber screen. This internal threshold marks the edge of the original house. The shift into the kitchen/dining area allows for level access to the rear garden.
To maintain the simplicity of the kitchen, a utility space is tucked away below the stairs. Practical and carefully detailed, it features dedicated lockers for the children to place their wet and muddy clothes, and opens onto a side courtyard.
Upstairs, Smith Young Architects has arranged four bedrooms around a large landing with a balcony viewing down into the entrance hall. The landing links to a flexible play space with sliding doors that allow the combined area to be used as one.
This is not a grand house; it is not extravagant, and does not shout its presence on the street. It is however a bold, contemporary, cleverly planned, carefully detailed example of the benefits of using an architect for a domestic project. It is an exemplary prototype for a modern suburban family home.
View all of our North West winners here, and all our RIBA UK Award winners here.
View the full RIBA UK Awards 2025 process.
RIBA UK Awards 2025 sponsored by Autodesk, EH Smith, Equitone and VELUX
Credits
Contractor Carey Building Services
Structural engineer Sanan Consulting