award winning architects

Tuesday, 14 June 2011 00:00

Dominic Eaton, Residential

Dominic Eaton

Residential Sector Roller Coaster Ride

It seems that the residential sector has been going through a roller coaster ride recently.

We have seen a period of intense activity, maintaining a strong workload of apartments and housing from both the private and public sectors. An interesting trend has been a shift towards housing, with PPG 3 brown field sites consisting of high density high rise apartment schemes, being thin on the ground. These projects offer real architectural potential but we are rising to the challenge of designing low rise housing.

The housing market is certainly dominating work throughout our network of studios with large scale developments underway in Plymouth for Redrow and Street, phases 2&3 for Barratts. Both sites will offer over 200 houses and Stride Treglown has even redesigned schemes with planning permission for apartments into houses; such is the shift in the market.

There is no denying that the residential sector still faces challenges and developers are requiring a greater amount of certainty in terms of viability before they give you a green light to go to planning – 'there is a big difference between demand and desire'. I can see a shortfall in housing numbers compared with the number of people who need homes and most don't have the money or the opportunities to raise the money to put down as a deposit. I think that's why we have seen a shift towards the housing market, which presents some with a unique opportunity to design innovative town houses, located on small sites with creative amenity space via terracing and roof gardens.

Dominic Eaton, Director (Bath Studio Stride Treglown Tektus & Residential)

You can view our residential projects here: projects / residential