DMA

It was great to see Cosway Street win a 2025 Civic Trust Award. Cosway Street is a development of 49 homes for Westminster City Council that we took on from planning and delivered last year. This is one of numerous awards that the development has won – congratulations to the entire team!

The project was technically complex. The design concept, by Bell Phillips Architects, was a contemporary take on the surrounding late-Victorian and Georgian brick buildings, and a key feature is the distinctive façade of curved, fluted, brick panels that vary in rhythm and tone across the length of the building. The idea was to craft the building as if it had been carved from brick. We worked closely with façade specialist, Decomo, to test colours, gradation and finish in large, 3m-wide, prototype panels and to work out the geometries of the fluted shapes. It involved 117 different brick shapes in each of three different colours, and five different shades of mortar to give the gradated colour effect. Offsite construction meant that precise tolerances could be achieved and the quality of the brickwork could be seamless. In all, 285 precast panels were manufactured by Decomo in Belgium to create 3,500sqm of finished façades. The MMC solution also reduced build time and meant that, along with the use of a fully filled cavity using non-combustible insulation, we were able to improve the building fabric’s environmental performance.

Another complexity was the proximity of the basement foundations to the Bakerloo line and the need to protect residents from the noise of the trains below. To isolate the vibration, the basement sub-structure was de-coupled from the super-structure using vibration pads, meaning that the structure essentially sits on springs with the pre-cast façades hung from it. We worked closely with Robert Bird Group, the structural engineers, and the rest of the design team to ensure that the structures, services, precast façade loading, waterproofing, and detailing junctions worked together to avoid transmitting any vibrations through the building. Service penetrations across the façade were carefully designed out, working closely with CBG, the services engineers. We used the balconies to conceal services, with downpipes and rainwater pipes recessed into either side of them, also neatly hiding the joint between the façade panels and the traditional brickwork lining the recesses. This maintains the seamless design language of the façade and the impression of a building ‘carved from brick’.

At the heart of the project was a building information model that helped maintain close coordination between the team during design and construction, and allowed us to provide the client with an asset information model at completion. This enabled the team to make holistic decisions for each technical design solution, helping to preserve the original concept and aesthetics. The design information was directly linked to the design specification using NBS Chorus from the outset of the project, helping to increase efficiencies in the design process and reduce risk.

You can watch Sundas Rohilla, Project Architect, talk about the build in this video and you can find out more about the project here.