DMA

In 2020, DMA designed a series of affordable housing projects for Westminster City Council on infill sites, making use of underused car parks to provide new, high quality and much-needed homes. We’re delighted to see three of these schemes recently completed, with residents moving in.

Turing House provides 20 one-bedroom homes at social rent for residents aged over 60. Designed to Happi principles and featuring a community room and rooftop terrace, it creates a supportive, accessible living environment for older people, enhancing independence and wellbeing. Gabriel, a Turing House resident, said:

“To have a place like this, a new home with all these facilities, we wake up in the morning and we have a purpose. We have everything, we don’t worry about anything else.”

Wick House on the Torridon Estate, provides another 21 new homes for social rent and was designed as two terraces with a landscaped communal ‘street’ between them. The new apartment block and a lower mews terrace of family homes respond to the scale and density of the surrounding buildings, with brick patterns, colours and modern mansard roofs to reference the traditional housing nearby.

The last of the series is Farrant House on the Queen’s Park Estate, which replaces a council-owned car park and redundant storage with 23 new homes for social rent. The scheme takes design cues from the Victorian cottages of the surrounding Queen’s Park Conservation Area, with its brick details, modern mansard roofs and moves such as rotating the end-of-terrace houses to avoid presenting a blank gable façade at the edge of the street block, creating a visual link between old and new. Pedestrianised, landscaped areas have been created between the buildings for the use of existing estate residents as well as new, with a careful delineation of private amenity space for residents on the ground floor.

All three schemes sit comfortably within their neighbourhoods and already look as if they have always been here as well as clearly demonstrating Westminster’s commitment to building high-quality homes for social rent. Congratulations to all involved in the design and delivery of these new homes and for more information and photos, see the project case studies – Turing House, Wick House, Farrant House.