Unless you live in it or right next to it, you’ve probably never noticed the group of flats that appeared a few years ago at Crosland Place, near the junction of Lavender Hill and Taybridge Road – hidden away behind the green door pictured above. It was developed by Marston properties – a local firm we have got to know rather well as they’re also the people behind the Plough Brewery on Wandsworth Road, the now-complete project to redevelop the pub next door, and a current major redevelopment of the Artesian Well and Lost Society.

It was a difficult site to work with, and it would take Marston five whole years to complete the small development after they bought the site in 2016, which at the time was an old metal products warehouse. Marston’s team rather liked the initial building, but soon realised that it was not going to be workable as a residential conversion, given the lack of natural light and the difficulty of making it meet any modern building or energy efficiency standards – so they set about designing a completely new building.

The architects were Sergison Bates, who clearly found this small and complicated site to be a properly interesting challenge and spent considerable time designing something a bit special! There was only one access route, through a mews passageway that went under a Victorian house. The site was at a lower level than the gardens around it, and many of those houses were really quite close to the property line – which limited what could be done, and which meant that some serious ingenuity was needed to create flats with a sense of light and space.

The scheme has nine apartments, most of which have two or three bedrooms. They all have a private courtyard of one form or another, designed to bring air and character to the properties. In a particularly clever use of the complicated site the development as a whole faces on to a two-storey inner courtyard that is separate from the access mews. This means everyone has access to both a decent communal space in the courtyard, and their own private space. The development uses robust materials that give a sense of calm and also of quality – including terracotta and oak floors, and pale grey bricks that echo the former industrial building on the site.

We remember visiting one of the earliest neighbour consultations on the proposed scheme, which the developers and architects held in the old building back in 2017; they applied for planing permission later that year. The first application was turned down, on grounds including the impact on the privacy of one of the neighbouring properties. This led to the scheme being very slightly revised, to lower some walls and make minor adjustments in view of neighbours’ concerns, which led to it getting planning permission the next year. Someone still wasn’t happy because some of the neighbours then started proceedings to challenge Wandsworth’s approval decision with a Judicial Review. This didn’t ultimately materialise – but it did delay the project further.

There were then a series of minor challenges in getting a contractor on board – but these were resolved when Uprise Ltd was appointed in summer 2019; demolition of the old building started in October and the site was fully cleared by the end of the year. As part of the build project Marston negotiated to borrow part of their neighbours’ gardens, as well as the Ecole du Parc nursery playground, for most of a year so that they could rebuild the retaining walls. And with rather unfortunate timing this was scheduled for March 2020 to April 2021, at precisely the point when people were stuck at home amid Coronavirus lockdowns and needed their rather limited garden space more than ever! The aerial photo below shows the challenge this caused the neighbours – with two metre slices chopped off and faced with large hoardings.

The flats were completed in April 2021, a few months behind schedule, with the build costing a whisker under £3 million. None of the flats were on sale: instead, Marston is retaining ownership of the whole building, and renting them out. The keys were handed to the letting agent in the middle of May and they went like hot cakes: within five days all nine apartments had been let. The first occupants moved in a week later, and by the end of June the scheme was fully occupied.

It soon became clear that the end result was an unusually high quality bit of design. It was clearly popular with residents, which is the first rule of development! But it also started to make serious waves in architectural circles. This small locally-led project, built to a pretty normal sized budget and barely even known in its own neighbourhood, quickly started to win some big prizes – starting with the Housing Design Award 2022, followed by the Architect of the Year Award for Private Housing 2022, and then the National RIBA Award 2023.

And now it’s on the biggest platform of them all, as what is being described as ‘Lavender Hill courtyard housing’ has now made it on to the shortlist of the final five contenders for the Stirling Prize – which is the most prestigious architecture award in the UK. Patrick Lynch at Architecture Today reported that:

Sergison Bates’ new building at Clapham […] sticks in the memory like an image from a folk tale. Part miniature castle, part microcosmic garden, the evocatively named Lavender Hill housing embodies many of the practice’s interests in type and tectonics that have characterised its output over the past 25 years or so. It’s curiously absolutely embedded in its situation and place, and also somewhat uncanny and other. It’s as if the quality of air and light changes as you enter under the archway and move through the thickness of the castle-like walls, arriving refreshed and surprised into a tiny verdant courtyard at the heart of the scheme.

Chris Foges, in a review of the development at Architects Journal, described the development as ‘compact but magical’, and said that:

It’s often said that great architecture needs constraints. Well, Sergison Bates certainly had them at […] a small housing scheme in south London, and they have provided the stimulus for a building of rare ingenuity and imagination. Replacing an old workshop on a small backland site, hemmed in by the garden walls of terraced houses on three sides, it has almost no outlook. Instead, the architect has structured the nine homes around an array of ‘inner worlds’ that are rich in spatial and material character, yet pervaded by an almost palpable sense of calm.

Our photo below shows the model of the development proudly on display at the home of British architecture, the Royal Institute of British Architects, at Portland Place – together with one of the bricks that was used in the development and an architects’ sketch book.

The Stirling Prize is a big deal, and to even be on the shortlist is a huge achievement for a development like this one that doesn’t have starchitects behind it or big-name high profile customers. Credit is clearly due to Sergison Bates for their skill in designing it – and also to Marston Properties for being an architects’ dream client and going for quality and imaginative approaches, rather than just cramming on whatever could get away with, as well as to the builders who took this forward to a high standards amid Covid chaos in the wider building sector.

Regardless of the big prizes, ultimately what we have here is nine very liveable properties making very clever use of the space, and showing that with a bit of imagination and a god architect, even the most unpromising and complicated site can become a very liveable, high-quality home.

If you found this interesting you may want to see our articles on a nearby Council-led housing development at Gideon Road (and a more recent one on its next phase), a smaller but also rather clever new build round the corner from this one, a detailed piece about the history & development of the Cedars Road estate, or our article just looking at the sheer build quality of Battersea’s reference library.