Lilac Close, Hatfield

Lilac Close was one of two garage sites identified for redevelopment as part of the council’s own affordable housing programme. The brief called for the project to meet best practice and exceed NDSS, including HQI’s and an enhanced energy performance to address fuel poverty and reduce carbon emissions. Finally, it must also have a sense of place!

The site came with its own unique set of constraints and difficulties and our role was to identify those early on so as to manage expectations while looking to optimise the sites full potential while managing risk. So significant were the constraints, that they informed the very early concept design.

The concept is a simple street of seven two-bedroom detached houses set in a hard-landscaped mews on a site barely 18m in width. Our approach provided maximum flexibility in addressing the changes in levels, accommodating the ad hoc pedestrian and vehicular access to neighbouring properties, avoid poor ground conditions, and serving to reduce any sense of overbearing on the neighbouring properties, retaining long-distant views or ‘sky gaps’ as well as visual interest.

Traditional in style the houses create a new ‘mews’ within a suburban context that is new yet familiar and has established a new community almost immediately after residents have moved in and the antisocial behaviour has long gone.

The design team worked throughout the project to ensure a robust brief was developed and interrogated through a series of stakeholder meetings. The result has been the delivery of exemplar new affordable homes for local families, the first new council housing in the borough for 25 years.