Up a steep Welsh hillside
Christopher Sanders knows Denbigh well, having lived and worked as an
architect in the north Wales town for much of his life. Yet finding a site
for his own home proved an exercise in patience.
While working on another project, he noticed a small parcel of derelict land
just outside the town’s walls. It tempted him, though it would have scared
off most developers — a steep slope dropped away to one side, a legacy of
Denbigh’s old quarry works.
It took Sanders, now 64, 10 years to track down the site’s three different
owners and to buy up the land, piece by piece. “The largest piece cost about
£8,000. In all, it was about £12,000,” he says.
“I always felt that we would be able to build on it — I’m well used to dealing
with sites like this. Builders and developers are looking for more
straightforward plots, while I tend to like things that other people reject
or don’t even notice.”
Once he owned the site, Sanders faced a catalogue of problems. Denbigh’s thin,
winding streets and narrow Burgess Gate meant access to the site for
machinery and materials was very restricted.
“There was no hope of having 10,000 bricks come in on a truck,” he says. “That
led us into using a steel frame to build the house, which offered the most
flexibility and drew on skills available locally.”
The first planning application was refused. Local officials did not want the
flat, sedum-planted green roof that Sanders proposed to keep the view clear
for his back neighbours. He replaced it with a pitched roof in Welsh slate.
The house itself was pushed into the hillside and anchored to the rock
below. A glass-fronted, double-height conservatory cantilevers out over the
slope in dramatic fashion.
“We always had the idea that we would build something for ourselves,” says
Sanders. He and his wife, Mau-reen, 60, spent about £200,000 building the
three-bed house, which is valued at about £500,000.
“The idea was to make it melt into its surroundings. Most of the neighbours
came round to it,” he says.
Christopher Sanders Architect, 01745 813 852
On the edge of London’s plague pits
When she was looking for a site on which to build her home, Suzanne Brewer
came across a back garden in Blackheath, southeast London, that she thought
was worth a try. There was a risk of overlooking neighbouring houses and
being overlooked by them, however; access for cars and the delivery of
materials was also awkward, and sewerage and water connections would have to
be made over long distances.
There was also archeological sensitivity: the site is on the edge of
Blackheath’s old plague burial pits, and in a conservation area. As an
architect, Brewer knew any planning application would be closely scrutinised.
But she navigated her way through the system with an innovative design. As
part of the application process, she also had to draw up plans for the
garden plot next door, to prove that her own project would not jeopardise
the neighbouring site’s privacy in the future, for Brewer’s plot and the
next-door garden had long been viewed as a pair. Both had formed a single
garden behind a Georgian house that was bombed in the second world war. Two
houses had replaced it, each with a narrow, long garden to the rear.
Having spent £250,000 on her plot and about £350,000 building her home,
Brewer’s second design attracted the attention of Wellington Construction,
the developer that owned the neighbouring plot.
“I thought it would be a shame to waste the work that I’d done on the
neighbouring site, so I talked it through with Wellington,” says Brewer, 33.
“The thing I am most pleased about now the house is done is that all of
Wellington’s other work to date has been traditional. It’s the first time
it’s done a really contemporary house.”
Similar in its spec, size, look, detailing and build cost to Brewer’s place,
Stoneley, as the new house is called, faced many of the same planning
issues. Brewer looked at why an application in the 1980s had failed and made
sure she addressed every issue.
The site itself is narrow, 7m by 30m, and reached by a tight-access mews to
the rear, bordered by a wall running the length of the street, which has no
room for parking. So Stoneley had to have its own parking spot hidden behind
a garage door sunk into the boundary wall. To alleviate planners’ concerns
about privacy, the house has no windows along its sides. Downstairs is
largely open-plan, allowing light to filter through from front to rear,
while a light well around the stairs brings more sunlight into the building.
Because of the plague pits, work had to be monitored by archeologists.
Fortunately, nothing was found that delayed the build, and Brewer was able
to connect the house to a 110m water main that had been laid along the mews
to service her own home. Three-bed Stoneley is now on the market with
Kershaws for £950,000.
Suzanne Brewer Architects, 07702 996 727, www.suzannebrewerarchitects.com;
Kershaws, 020 8297 2922, www.kershaws.eu
In the shadow of an old East Sussex railway viaduct
As a project manager in the construction industry, Aaron Curtis knows a thing
or two about problem-solving. His company, Macrae Macleod, collaborates with
developers and has its own development portfolio, so he is always looking
out for new sites.
With eight children between them, Curtis, 43, and his girlfriend, Raphaella
Boycott, 41, needed a big home and decided to build it on a £60,000 plot in
Lewes, East Sussex, that developers had dismissed.
“Most people would probably have been frightened by the site,” says Curtis,
“but we thought we could pull a rabbit out of the hat.”
His biggest problem was a large railway viaduct that had once stood on the
land. A single arch remained just beyond the plot, used by Curtis’s new
neighbour as a roof garden. The foundations of another arch were still in
situ on his site, with some submerged beams that helped to stabilise his
neighbour’s arch, all of which had to be worked around during the building
of his home.
Curtis talked to planners and conservation officers and worked on designs with
Duncan Baker-Brown, an architect with BBM Sustainable Design in Lewes. They
were restricted to building on the footprint of the arch that had once stood
on Curtis’s plot, but wanted to test the limits of what they could achieve.
“We asked if we could cantilever out at first-floor level and come back in
again at the top of the building, and they allowed us to do that. By
cantilevering, we got an extra en-suite bathroom on the first floor.”
With neighbouring houses close by, the scale of the home’s rear windows was
minimised and louvres were added at the top for privacy. There was also a
risk of flooding, so the ground floor was required to be “flood-friendly”:
water can wash in and out, without damaging the place.
During construction, live high-voltage cables owned by Network Rail were
discovered along the street, which meant that the home’s sewage, power and
water connections had to be rerouted around them. The build cost was
£240,000; the five-bed house is valued at £900,000.
Macrae Macleod, 01273 488 787, www.macraemacleod.co.uk;
BBM Sustainable Design, 01273 480 533, www.bbm-architects.co.uk
