Category: Thinking Buildings

Affordable Housing Site in Gloucestershire

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This exciting scheme for 17 affordable units to the north of Cheltenham and Gloucester is currently making it’s way through the planning process. The site accommodates four 3-bed house, seven 2-bed houses and six apartments, all to HQI standards. 

It was a challenging site to develop, as it borders on three sides a much larger development with an approved outline consent for a masterplan of new housing, commercial hubs and community and service buildings. We worked with our client and the design team to maximise the site, while providing a high quality public realm and meeting the local authority requirements for amenity and parking thresholds, and ensuring the scheme integrated with the masterplan areas surrounding it.

We’ll keep you posted on how things progress as the projects makes it’s way to determination.

The Importance of Sunlight

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Communicating well with our clients is one of the most important parts of our role as architects. We need to clearly explain our ideas in ways that you can understand. Traditional plans and elevations often don’t connect with people well, and don’t necessarily convey the more experiential parts of a building. For many, trying to visualise how something will look when built and how a space will feel from a 2D image or drawing is understandably difficult.

One of the huge benefits of working in 3D is that once we have created a model of your building there are lots of things we can do with it. We not only can use the model to create those plans and elevations we need for the planning and technical stages, we can also produce external and internal visualisations, drone-style videos and even walk-though animation to make sure you’re really clear on what your building is going to feel like when you’re in it.

The video here shows what it is like to move through this space, and also a timelapse showing how light will enter and change through the course of the day. This gets across the feeling of being in the space far better than a 2D drawing and allows our clients to really understand their design, so they can have confidence moving through the design process and on to site phase.

Sixth Form Expansion Plans

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Our education team are busy with many school development plans, planning applications and construction schemes. This image shows a 3D view for an expansion to the sixth form provision at John Port Spencer Academy in Derbyshire. We’ve received outline approval for the expansion of the school and now await the detailed planning consent. We’re working alongside Adair Cost Consultants, ABA Structural and Civil Engineers, and Triangle Consulting Engineers to deliver this exciting project.

Mixed Use Scheme in Central Oxford

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This is the latest rendered visualisation of our mixed use student accommodation and commercial/retail scheme in city centre Oxford. Planning consent has been secured for this complex infill site, successfully addressing challenging rights of light issues; the use of our 3D BIM model allowed us to fully assess impacts upon surrounding buildings and to develop the proposed building form and massing. We are really pleased how this scheme fits in with the street scene and environment. The apparent scale of the building has been reduced by changing the material to the third floor and the mass of the facade has been broken down into bays to provide a vertical rhythm to the street elevation.

Modern Development for City Centre Gap Site

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Completed this autumn, this development was designed for a private client to maximise a gap site in central Oxford. Thinking Buildings provided a design that incorporated two 1-bed houses, and one 3-bed house, all meeting the required Oxford City Council standards for minimum room and amenity sizes. The design is working hard to provide generous accommodation on a restricted site.

The defining feature of the street façade are the zinc-clad balconies, that provide a sharp contemporary finish to the buildings, as well as valuable amenity space to the residents. With a small site the palette was limited to provide a cool, minimalist impression. This prevents the street scene from feeling too crowded, despite the frontage being almost wholly infilled

Conservation Aware Contemporary Home

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It is great to see so many Thinking Buildings projects coming close to completion. This one is close to our Bloxham office and is a really interesting design solution and a stunning home. Planning consent was secured at appeal for this new barn that sits within a courtyard of barns in a conservation area. To the courtyard side it is simple, restrained and vernacular in style, with a few modern touches. To the rear the entire ground floor is glazed with minimal framed sliding doors and oak cladding. Internally, the ground floor is open plan with a double height entrance and lovely oak clad pods housing the utility room and wc.

We are really pleased with the clients kind words   – “Thinking Buildings helped me from my original mad idea to build a house in my garden – they did a brilliant job and getting us through the planning process and they were always at hand to give sage advice – helping me make the right decision – taking my ideas and vision and translated them in to reality – I am thrilled with the outcome – my dream home!”

Modern House for the South Downs

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Our fingers remain crossed for this project as it moves slowly through the planning system. This contemporary new house is located with a National Park, one of the most challenging environments for designing new buildings. These extremely sensitive projects require a landscape led approach from the outset and the development of a clear design concept to successfully blend the new house with the special qualities of the site and surrounding landscape.
 
Set within the South Downs, Thinking Buildings & DSA landscape has developed the design to sensitively integrate the new building into the sloping site. The fragmented roof line gently rises and falls to echo the undulating landscape that forms the backdrop to the site and a mixture of timber cladding and core-ten steel cladding provides warmth and tone to compliment the overall design.
 
The interior of the new house has been configured to provide wonderful views of the landscape. Accommodation includes 5 bedrooms, open plan living area, sitting room. A semi basement provides a home gym and swimming pool with stunning views to the east.

School Expansion Phase 1 Car Park Expansion Complete

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Earlier in the year, Phase One and Two of the John Port Spencer Academy Masterplan commenced with the expansion of the car park and the major refurbishment of the academy’s Art + Design Faculty. The car park is an essential strategic step in delivering the masterplan and last week was completed ahead of the pupils returning to school.

The works to the Art + Design Faculty incorporate the repurposing and refurbishment of spaces across three existing buildings to provide four generic Art Classrooms, along with dedicated Photography, Textile and Graphics Classrooms. Works to the main art building were also completed ahead of the pupils return, with the other two on track to be handed over in November.

Post-War House to Contemporary Home

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How to create a beautiful home from a tired post war house. We recently visited a nearly complete project and we were so pleased to see such a dramatic transformation. Much of the existing building was retained, over insulated and over rendered and new 2 storey extensions added to the side to create a beautiful home on the edge of Deddington. A fantastic project and example of what can be done to rejuvenate and re-use our older buildings.

Somerset Refurbishment Project Update

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Works are well underway on a series of projects on a large privately owned estate in Somerset. This is the smallest of the projects, being a former 2-up, 2-down cottage that is being fully renovated and extended to provide a modern 3-bed house.

The cottage had been empty for a number of years, and there were several unsympathetic, low quality lean-to additions that required removal. So the first few weeks of the build have been spent demolishing and striping back and setting up the bones of the future house. Reconstruction is well underway now, and the benefit of the new extensions can begin to be seen. The proposals include a two storey side extension to provide two new bedrooms (the smallest first floor room is to become a family bathroom) and to the rear a single storey kitchen extension to maximise the living space.

This project is located in the Exmoor National Park and so despite being a modest scheme has had to be carefully considered to be suitable for this beautiful and sensitive site. Thinking Buildings have designed a appropriate response that gained the support of the Park planning authority. It’s great to see a unloved building being brought back into proper use.