Exhibition Mews
Ash Sakula has completed an Eco-terrace, three prototype affordable homes for social rent in the Eco-town of Whitehill Bordon in Hampshire for housing association the Radian Group.
This follows Ash Sakula winning entry in an open design competition run by East Hampshire District Council and Radian in 2012. The competition, which attracted 54 submissions, sought to create exemplary housing on a challenging site at the entrance to the town. Designs were to be capable of replication on other sites in the town, and to achieve the highest possible sustainable standards. Ash Sakula’s proposal, unanimously chosen by a panel of architects and local residents, features three houses each comprising a highly insulated core of flexibly arranged accommodation supplemented by an uninsulated entrance space opening onto an enclosed front garden. Importantly, the competition called for sustainable lifestyle suggestions to be embedded into the buildings themselves. Ash Sakula’s plan layout is focussed on how people actually want to live and it was this careful examination of how the houses would work for their occupants which appealed to the competition jury of housing professionals and local residents, and led to the project winning first prize. The generosity of space and loose-fit flexibility of the scheme was deemed a real success, and the jury suggested that employing these attributes will bring the construction industry closer to designing homes that are inherently sustainable.
The competition was also interested in the applicability of the base design to other sites. In response, Ash Sakula developed a range of different configurations for the eco-terrace typology, allowing three and four bedroom variants and a variety of layouts.
The terrace as built consists of three two-storey houses, each of two bedrooms. They have a simple cubic massing, each with an asymmetrical saw-tooth roof for south-facing PV panels at an optimum pitch of 30˚. Adjacent to the terrace is a small but tall building, wearing the same clothes as the terrace. It contains a communal recycling and refuse storage area for the three houses, while its upper part provides an attic for bats and eaves for house martins.
At the rear of the houses is a communal wild garden, planted to encourage wildlife habitats. Each house has its own sunken patio within this shared terrain.
The compact core of each house forms an easy to build, easy to insulate, easy to heat, easy to live in volume. Each house is entered through a glass-roofed indoor/outdoor space that occupiers may use as a boot room, a workshop, a greenhouse, a playspace, a meet and greet threshold and an all round stress reducing extra space. It contains a large coat cupboard and has a glazed screen wall opening onto the patio front garden. Alongside the entrance space is an external store, which comfortably houses two bicycles and tools.
Within the core ground floor of each house is a kitchen and dining space and a living room space, divided by the staircase. The kitchen opens onto the front garden. Behind the kitchen is a WC, capable of conversion into a shower room. The living room is long, and is lit from both ends, allowing two zones of activity: a seating/TV zone and a study/homework zone. Upstairs are two double bedrooms and a bathroom. The high, spacious landing operates as a laundry area, with washing machine and airing cupboards, and a high roof opening to a skylight where a hanging clothes dryer is located. At the back of the living room, a glazed door leads out onto a sunken patio area within the wider expanse of the shared eco-garden.
The houses are well adapted for inclusive living. They can welcome the disabled, and can adapt over time to meet changing needs and growing infirmity. Thus they have level thresholds, a downstairs WC large enough to convert to a shower room, circulation sufficient for non-ambulant users, and meet all aspects of the detailed Lifetime Homes criteria. The second bedroom can function as a home office, and the length of the living room with windows at each end enables a study or homework corner to be located there.
