19 October/20 October 2019 ★ FT Weekend 17
31/44, who designed another example,
the Red House in south London.
“They often demand innovative
thinking”, says Chris Bryant, director of
Alma-nac, an architectural practice that
has designed several homes on fiddly
plots. “The buildings that emerge can-
not really avoid being interesting,” says
Jack Woolley, another architect with an
interest in infill sites.
Planning regulations are often a prob-
lem for those wishing to develop infill
sites.UK planners usually demand a
minimum distance of 18 metres
between windows of “habitable rooms”
—bedrooms, dining rooms and living
rooms in neighbouring houses that
even flat roofs. The idea is to offer mod-
ulardesigns with standard elements
that can be arranged to fittricky sites —
likeone house esigned by the architectd
Faye Toogood on a site between back
gardens in Stoke Newington.
Co-founder Paul Tully claims that
nine-tenths of each of its off-the-peg
modular designs, which the company
has commissioned from well-known
architectural practices including Adjaye
Associates, could be reused from plot to
plot. The company plans to offerits
homes for between £850,000 and
£1.1m, which the developer claims rep-
resents a 10 per cent discount on an
equivalent home in the same area.
Cube Haus has yet to break ground on
its first project. For the time being, land-
owners seeking to develop tricky sites
must commission a creative architec-
tural practice and prepare for a pro-
tracted planning process. Yet the
rewards for perseverance can be great.
Walking into the Periscope House, it
certainly feels like it.(Top left and
top) Periscope
House; (right)
Red House;
(above) a Cube
Haus-Faye
Toogood project
Helenio Barbetta; Rory
Gardiner; Edit.ruHouse Home
solutions that arise often challenge con-
ventional planning wisdom or building
regulations,” says Bryant.
One developer attempting to stand-
ardisesmall sites is Cube Haus. The
company, through land agent Land Con-
verter, offers to buy “unused and awk-
ward spaces” — gardens, outbuildings,A 2015 report by the Future of London
think-tank noted it can be prohibitively
expensive to relocate the pipes and wir-
ingrunning beneath an empty plot.
So infill developmentremains niche.
Architecture practices experienced in
designing for such sites usually have
only a handful of completed projects to
their name. Yet that could change: the
mayor of London’s office estimated in
2017 that nearly 250,000 homes could
be built on sites of less than 0.25ha.
Consultancy Urban R+D as mappedh
potential infill sites in the London
borough of Hackney, calculating that
9,855 homes could be built on under-
used space in that borough alone. The
company estimates that developing
these sitescould provide homes for
32,550 people — or 10 per cent of the
borough’spopulation.
Much of this land remains undevel-
oped becauseit offers no economies of
scale. “The uniqueness [of infill sites]
which leads to innovation also doesn’t
allow for much repetition, and theoverlook each other. This can often sty-
myie development, because the sites are
usually located close to or between
existing homes.
Groves Natcheva and client McGuin-
ness took three years to persuade Brent
Council togrant planning permission
for Periscope House’s idiosyncratic
plot. Some of the compromises the
architects came up with are laboured by
necessity. For example, shutters on the
floor-to-ceilingglazing opposite a row of
terraced houses are non-removable.
Street-facing windows were sacrificed
to convince the authorities that the
house would fit the streetscape. But
patience paid off, and McGuinness
claims his rental yields on the three-
bedroom house are among the highest
in the area.
Building near existing dwellings and
their infrastructure is another technical
challenge. Several of Woolley’s infill
designs maximisespacewith ubterra-s
nean storeys, which means excavating
closeto the foundations of old buildings.
Threearchitectural practices
specialising in infill design:c31/44— Red House (2017) was
built on the site of a garage
abutting an East Dulwich terrace.
The architects subverted motifs
from neighbouring homes,
recreating an arch in patterned cast
concrete as a window rather than a
front door, ensuring continuity with
the streetscape. One of the
directors designed Lewisham’s No.
49 (2017) for himself, winning three
RIBA awards, including London
Small Project of the Year 2017.
cAlma-nac Wedge House—
(2018) is squeezed into a tapered
3.1m gap between semi-detached
houses in Southwark. The firm also
designed the diminutive In-
betweeny House (2017), adding a
studio to an existing terraced home
that can be usedas an extension or
as a self-contained residence.
cJack Woolley —30 Cardozo
Road (2013) was built on a derelict
end-of-terrace Islington site and
makes the best of a limited plot
with one underground floor.
Woolley has worked on several
more infill homes, including 83
Foxberry Road (2018) in Peckham.Best firms for odd sites
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