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This week (which is week 16 for those of you who’ve been paying attention), Rob was invited to talk about housing design excellence at the Midlands Regional office for the Homes & Communities Agency (HCA).

Organised and run by the HCA in central Birmingham, the main aim of the event was to share ideas and results about Housing Design Quality. The HCA organised the event for their delivery partners to share key findings from their recent QAIV Quality Counts report (Quality Assurance and Impact Visits).

Over the last 4 years, the HCA has been visiting tenants to get an idea of what they think of their homes. The information gathered about what could be improved and what lessons can be learned will inform the affordable homes programme over the next 4 years.

Alongside the other keynote speakers (Richard Baines from Black Country Homes and Architect Glenn Howells), Rob gave a presentation that expanded on a previous piece written for Building Design Magazine’s Housing Blog examining the impact of technology and services on the history of housing. Entitled ‘Scullery Made: Servicing the housing industry’, it proposed a return to a better appreciation of the need for greater storage and its integration with mechanical services.

The remainder of the event was made up of workshop-style discussion sessions. Workshop topics included tenant engagement, sustainability & technology, internal layout quality and external design. We were able to share our experience of sustainable design such as our Passivhaus research, along with the web-based consultation we have carried out on projects such as Hill Top in Warwickshire and the Eco Terrace project in Newcastle under Lyme.

Care of Podnosh, have a listen to Brandwood End Resident’s Group Chairman, Steve Walters, and other residents talk about the history of the Brandwood End housing project in Kings Heath, Birmingham:

We’re delighted to report that along with our team of sub-consultants, we have been successful in a competitive tender for Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s first Custom Home Building project. The former Penkhull Farm site on Newcastle Road in Stoke-on-Trent has been chosen by Stoke City Council and the design team led by Axis Design will be carrying out an initial site appraisal and submitting an outline planning application.

The outline application proposals will be designed to provide guidance to future investors regarding the key principles of the site and must acknowledge the need to create low energy homes. Our recent work around the Affordable Passivhaus project led us to develop house type models that deliver the highest level of energy performance at low cost. We hope there will be an opportunity to incorporate our PassivHaus research into this project.

In our experience the most successful housing developments are those created through a collaborative approach. As such, the Custom Home Building project will be supported in its delivery through the use of our web-based project management system to improve liaison with all stakeholders. In addition, we will be including the use of BIM as part of our service on this project.

A little more about Custom Home Building in Stoke….

The Government published their Housing Strategy paper in November 2011, and are proposing to offer financial support for self-build developments, referred to as ‘Custom Home Building’. Through this paper (pdf of ‘Laying The Foundations’), councils are being asked to assess the demand for custom-build in their area and take positive steps to facilitate it.

Stoke City Council recently launched their Mandate for Change, setting out a clear plan to make Stoke-on-Trent a great city to live in and in support of this, there is a proposal to promote Custom Home Building to assist in improving housing quality across the city. The council are hosting a Housing Summit later in 2012 and this project will be used at the event to publicise Custom Home Building to local residents and potential partners.

“It is recognised that Custom Home Building can make a stronger contribution to economic growth and a significant contribution to the number of new homes built…. In the case of Stoke, there is a desire to attract wealth creators to the city, as part of a wider regeneration programme.”

Together with our project partners at Brooks Devlin, Capita Symonds and EH Smith, along with specialist product suppliers, we gathered together 17 housing associations and representatives from the HCA to share Passivhaus construction principles at a dedicated event in Birmingham City Centre on 21st February.

Our affordable PassivHaus project was initially created in response to a call for solutions by the BRE in 2011. The event was an opportunity share our knowledge with developers interested in how to design and build Passivhaus standard housing. We began with presentations from the design team to explain the technicalities and design based on passivHaus principles, followed by an exhibition from specialist product suppliers.

Responses to the presentations from our audience addressed important questions about lifecycle costings, ongoing maintenance, simplification of mechanical and electrical engineering in early design stages and alternative systems.

We’ll be sharing as much as possible over the next few weeks through the dedicated affordable PassivHaus website.

Week notes #3 & #4…

Lately it’s been all about http://affordablepassivhaus.info:

Over the last few months we have been carrying out a detailed R&D project into making Passivhaus design principles a financially viable option for social housing. Working alongside environmental designers, and certified European Passivhaus consultants Brooks Devlin, our proposals for an affordable Passivhaus were created initially in response to a call for solutions by the BRE Passivhaus competition in 2011.

We took up the challenge to develop our proposals further because we think that construction standards in the UK will require a significant move towards Passivhaus principles. We are launching the project at an event in February aimed at local authorities and housing associations in order to disprove the myths surrounding Passivhaus build costs and share our research.

If you’re involved in delivering new build affordable housing and would like to come along to our event on 21st February in Birmingham, please register your interest via the Affordable Passivhaus website, get updates from the twitter account or drop us a line on email.

Axis Design have been working with Birmingham City Council since 2009 to help deliver the local authority’s ambitious social housing project, Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust (BMHT). To date we have designed new housing on seven different sites across Birmingham and over the last few months, the team’s hard work has been rewarded with a total of four awards including the top prize in two of the industry’s most prestigious awards ceremonies.

In September 2011, BMHT was the overall winner (Grand Prix) at Regeneration & Renewal Magazine’s Annual awards and also picked up an additional award in the Best Use of Housing category.

“I think that one of the things that impressed me, and still does, is the quality of the team. They’ve got very strong leadership, officers, developer partners – everybody lived and breathed this enterprise. The dedication is amazing.”
Mary Holt director of planning and development at Scott Wilson and judge for the ‘Best Use of Housing’ category at the Regeneration & Renewal Awards, 2011.

In November we were pleased to achieve another double win at the Inside Housing Magazine Awards (left); taking the trophy in the Outstanding Achievement in Housing in England category and also becoming the overall UK winner.

Finally, BHMT was also shortlisted for Sustainable Housing Finance category of the 2011 Inside Housing Sustainable Housing Awards.

We’re delighted by the success of the BMHT Programme and are looking forward to continuing our collaboration with Birmingham City Council and the BMHT Team in 2012.

Urban Vision North Staffordshire along with RIBA West Midlands recently asked us to be part of an event dedicated to Neighbourhood Planning. The event brought together representatives from four community groups based in Staffordshire with Architects who specialise in community engagement to help them in the early stages of their Neighbourhood Plan.

Rob went along armed with aerial photographs and a pile of blank Proboscis storycubes and stickynotes. He worked with the community group from the Burslem area of Stoke-on-Trent and was able to update the dedicated StickyRoom as conversation was taking place. Community representatives are being encouraged to use the StickyRoom after the event to allow dialogue to continue.

An update on one of our previous projects… A number of years ago we designed the first phase of a project called Pride in Camp Hill in Tuttle Hill, Nuneaton. We’ve mentioned it here previously in the project section but we’re returning to it again today and sharing more images because we’ve just discovered that the development has been awarded ‘Project of the Decade’ at the recent Regen WM awards. The awards covered a number of categories including this overarching one that asks the chair of the panel to choose their favourite of all the shortlisted nominations.

We’re delighted to have been involved in a project that has achieved such a fantastic accolade. Thanks to all the team members at Pride in Camp Hill and Lovell that we collaborated with.

More details of the award can be found at the Regen WM web site and also the Pride in Camp Hill web site. More photos are available on our flickr page.

Over at ecoterrace.co.uk we’ve launched our latest online tool for sharing information about our approach to sustainability. Click on the link below to visit the new design guide and then you can choose to be taken on a tour by pressing the play button or simply choose your own adventure by clicking on slides and notes of your choice.

Ecoterrace Design Guide (powered by Stickyworld)

We’ll be adding more info in the coming weeks and in future using it to share our findings when the energy monitoring process is complete.

Thanks to our collaborators at Slider Studio for helping us create this innovative new tool.

Our latest housing planning submission is a development of our BMHT work, delivering 12 new Code Level 4 houses on a difficult infill site in Bartley Green. Unusually for a project like this, the best layout solution proved to be to follow a similar arrangement to the previous housing on the site. The challenge with new housing however is the provision of right level of off street parking in locations that had none previously, and delivering the right quality of housing that meets standards such as Lifetime Homes and HCA quality indicators.