Residents recently moved into the homes on Trellis Mews, which Croydon Council bought from its failed housebuilding arm for £3.3 million last year.
According to Grounded, the design references the mid-20th century houses to the front of the site through its red brick flank walls while a decorative trellis to the front of the building references fretwork to the porches of the surrounding Edwardian villas.
The three-storey building sits on a backland site and is arranged around two stair cores, with each apartment accessed through south-facing terraces.
The scheme is orientated east to west, meaning the narrowest part of the massing sits towards the nearest neighbours. Planter boxes on the balconies help create privacy and minimise overlooking to the rear gardens of the neighbours.
The front of the building is formed of a standalone lightweight steel structure, allowing all the balconies to be load-bearing yet appear as if they are fully integrated into the fabric. The planter boxes have been designed as the balustrade system with aluminium C sections creating the fretwork to animate them.
The original garage walls on the edge of the site have been retained, minimising the need for boundary and party-wall discussions.
Some of the new tenants in the completed development have been rehoused from the notorious, mould-ridden Regina Road estate half a mile away.
Last year, the AJ reported that Croydon Council was looking for an architect to design the rebuilding of the 191-home estate whose residents had voted in favour of demolition.
Grounded (formerly Common Ground Architecture) completed initial designs for the scheme. Stitch was then appointed by Brick by Brick in 2020 and novated to take the design to completion.
Architect’s view
We’re really pleased with how the scheme has turned out; the balconies are fantastic. It is great to be able to deliver a balcony to each flat that is 2m2 bigger than the prescribed space standard and includes an integrated planter box packed with herbs for each of the residents and comes in under budget.
The success of this project lies in being incredibly lean in some aspects of the design to be able to be generous in others. The circulation space has been reduced to two staircases that feed directly on to the shaded south-facing balconies. As a backland site, it was the intention from early on that it would be sprinklered, and with a slight upgrade to the spec of that system, we were able to ensure that you could enter straight into the living spaces from the balconies.
The design is an essay in creating affordable, deliverable and characterful housing on infill sites. The costs of the project were around 11 per cent less than other benchmarked projects at the time, but the homes offer a lot back in return. This was achieved through some very compact design development of the layouts and some savvy planning which meant we could pretty much eliminate the majority of circulation space with two entry stairs feeding directly onto the balconies. The net to gross on the scheme is effectively 94 per cent.
These projects take years and many people to realise, and this project needs a special shout-out to Alexander Barretta and Elizabeth Owens who put a lot of hard yards into this scheme.
Chloe Phelps, chief executive officer, Grounded
Project data
Start on site 2020
Completion date 2022
Gross internal floor area 872m2
Form of contract or procurement route Single stage design and build, JCT contract
Architect Grounded, Croydon Council Design Team (RIBA stages 0-3A)
Client side advisor and construction monitoring Grounded (RIBA stages 4-7)
Executive architect Stitch (RIBA stages 3B-7)
Client Croydon Council
Structural engineer AKS Ward
M&E consultant SWECO
Sustainability consultant SWECO
QS Faithful + Gould, Ian Sayer & Co
Project manager Faithful + Gould
CDM principal designer Faithful + Gould
Approved building inspector Croydon Council Building Control
Main contractor Selsdon Building Constractors
CAD software used AutoCAD
Environmental performance data
On-site energy generation 7,770 kWh/yr (estimated)
Annual mains water consumption 110 litres per day/occupant (estimated)
Airtightness at 50Pa 3 m3/h.m2 (estimated)
Overall area-weighted U-value 0.19 W/m2K (estimated)
Annual CO2 emissions 12.08 kgCO2eq/m2 (estimated)