Award for Best Apartment Building
COPPER LOOK
Brewery Square, St John Street, Clerkenwell, London EC1V 4JU
It is the copper-clad building at Brewery Square with its cantilevered balconies that immediately captures the attention, but this is only one four blocks of private apartments designed by Hamilton Associates for this two-acre site of the former Allied Brewery in Clerkenwell. There are also six Cubist-style townhouses, which the judges hope to see entered in next year's awards, as they are a world apart from conventional townhouses.
It was Gardner Court (originally marketed as The Edge) that won the Copper in Architecture Award in 2003 for architectural design for its pre-patinated copper rainscreen panels, but there has also been praise for the other three blocks clad in rainscreen panels of perforated, which is why the whole development has been praised by CABE, the Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment, winning a Gold Standard award in its Building for Life series.
Brewery Square is more than just luxury housing, the 198 apartments being sold at prices from £235,000 for a one-bedroom flat up to £900,00 for each of the eight penthouses. The two- and three-bedroom townhouses (or mews houses, as they were marketed) were priced from £575,000 to £795,000. There are ground-floor retail units in the development for shops, bars and restaurants, and the developers also built a block of 57 affordable flats for Southern Housing Group, including14 two-bed flats for shared ownership and eight two-bed flats for wheelchair users to rent.
There is underground parking (under the public plaza) for 190 cars, of which 91 are for the apartments (including five spaces for disabled drivers) and the rest for retail and office tenants (there being plans for an office building on an adjoining site, which may end up being used for more apartments if the commercial market does not improve sufficiently). The cost of construction for the housing was £33 million, which is equivalent to £135 per sq ft and resulted in a density of 131 dwellings per acre (326 dwellings per hectare), well ahead of the Government's PPG3 targets.
Brewery Square has won the award this year for Best Apartment Building, principally for its five-storey copper-clad building but also for its three zinc-clad blocks ranging up to nine storeys high around the public landscaped plaza, for their interior design and specification is the same, with large areas of glazing, well-fitted kitchens and bathrooms, and generous balconies and terraces. Brewery Square is a vibrant urban community that shows the benefits of a socially aware developer working closely with a good firm of architects.
Homebuilder: BERKELEY HOMES (NORTH EAST LONDON) LIMITED
Berkeley House, Oakhill Road, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 1NQ
Tel 01732 227600
Fax 01732 227666
Website: www.berkeleyhomes.co.uk
Contact: Mark Dickenson, Operations Director.
Email: mark.dickenson@berkeleygroup.co.uk
Architects: HAMILTON ASSOCIATES
2 Jubilee Place, London SW3 3TQ
Tel 020 7351 5432
Fax 020 7352 5186
Website: www.hamilton-assoc.com
Contact: Craig Casci, Director.
Email: ha@hamilton-assoc.com