14 dwellings - completed 2025
a-206
Brick Orchard
Fourteen dwellings on a former orchard, drawn as two sections repeated seven times each, and one decision about how wide a walkway has to be before people stand on it.
One copper stroke, as on every drawing in the register. Here it is the access deck - 2.1 m, not the 1.2 m the standard asks for.
Deck access housing has a poor reputation earned honestly: a 1.2 m walkway past somebody's kitchen window is a corridor with weather in it, and nobody stops on it. The alternative, a core and a lobby for every four flats, costs three lifts on a site this size and was never affordable here.
The deck was drawn at 2.1 m instead. That is wide enough for two people to pass while a third stands still, which is the width at which a walkway starts being used as a place. It cost 84 m² of floor area across the scheme. We took that back by dropping the internal corridor from every dwelling, because with a deck this wide the front door can open into the living space.
Beyond that the building is deliberately repetitive. Two section types, seven of each, cross walls at 4.8 m centres, and the same window head height throughout. Fourteen homes were built from 31 drawings.
- Site
- Brick Orchard Lane, Loamside
- Client
- Loamside Housing Co-operative
- Programme
- 14 dwellings, 6 one-bed, 8 two-bed
- Gross floor area
- 1,180 m²
- Section types
- Two, repeated seven times each
- Cross wall centres
- 4.8 m
- Access deck
- 2.1 m clear
- Drawing set
- 31 sheets at 1:50
- Completed
- 2025
Working on something this shape?
Send us the site, the budget and the constraint you think is fixed. The first thing we send back is usually a section, because that is where we find out whether it is.