Weston Street

The scheme – eight flats above an office space – features high-quality materials and careful detailing, from the sharp tracing of timber formwork that mark finely cast concrete walls to the walnut and oak joinery which lines its interiors.

The block AHMM has designed is in the form of two staggered massings of five 2- and three 3-bedroomed flats, each massing stacked around a stair and lift core. Lying roughly east to west, the long southern face of the block is formed at ground level by the wall of the original warehouse, continuing to serve as a boundary to Guy Street Park. This provides a plinth or rustication, which grounds the block in the history of the site, while raising the flats up, providing privacy. The shorter eastern façade runs along Weston Street, with an entrance to the ground floor office, while the apartments are accessed from the north off a mews-type court, formed with two other blocks. 

The overall structure is an in-situ concrete shell, cast using rough-sawn Douglas fir shuttering to give a richly patterned surface where exposed internally. This is mostly faced with a dirty-blond Wienerberger brick, laid with flush white mortar joints to give a sense of mass to the exterior. At ground level to south and west the existing park wall was used as shuttering, with the in-situ concrete walls of the new building cast against them. 

The façades are punctured by anodised aluminium spandrelled windows, oak-framed internally and set in deep reveals. On the south side these are arranged into large L or T-shaped groupings – describing the interconnected internal volumes of each apartment – and punctuated by long precast concrete balconies protruding out.

Light floods each apartment, coming from three directions in the upper flats, which have generous skylights, with exposed concrete walls predominating. Joinery forms walls of shelving, cupboards and panelling, concealing storage and bathrooms.