Our clients had outgrown their 1970s bungalow in a generous corner plot and needed a fresh start. With sustainability in mind we designed a sleek, comfortable new home for them.
Contemporary design for family comfort
This new build residence in Solihull was designed to replace a rather dated previous construction which no longer served the family’s needs. After the inital design was rejected for being too large and out of scale with the rest of the street, Lapworth Architects were brought onto the project with a brief to replace and enlarge the existing building.
Much of the original architecture on the street dated from the late 1960s/1970s and many houses had been extended in different styles with often incoherent results. To avoid a ‘patchwork’ approach and improve the house’s energy efficiency, we opted for a completely new build home design rather trying to extend the existing house.
A prominent location on a desirable Solihull street
As the house was on a ‘gateway site’ at the entrance to the street, a new build residence with a coherent design was more appropriate than the piecemeal extensions seen along the street.
This corner site on two streets also allowed us to enlarge the house, providing the elevation onto the street was appropriately scaled – this had been an issue previously and led to our applications being turned down.
With this in mind, the architects retained the main gable with brick and render decorations at to match the frontage of the other houses on this leafy surburban street, with careful design this feature to avoid clashing with the mature trees on the plot.
The windows echoed the horizontal designs common to architecture of the time, and also opened the living accommodation up to the rear gardens downstairs. Open plan living was important to our clients, and all the spaces were designed with this in mind to create clearly-defined, but flexible areas that could be adapted if and when their lifestyle changed.
Top-quality residential architecture is our speciality at Lapworth Architects, so if you have a new build residential project for a family home in the Solihull or Sutton Coldfield area, or indeed anywhere in the West Midlands, get in touch to see how we can help you.
