Residential Floor Plans

In this six storey building. The first five floors are dedicated to a range of sizes of flats to accommodate a variety of tenants.

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The Corridors

A main design feature throughout the shared spaces in my design is curved walls. Curved walls are softer on the eye and the doorways located between the light voids and the external storage acts as a natural boundary between public and private space and giving them a feeling of “indoor streets”

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The Light Voids

Natural light was an important factor when designing the layout of this building. I wanted to give more attention to spaces which are normally disregarded when designing residential buildings. Light voids down the centre of the building allows me to avoid having narrow dark corridors and gives the space more purpose rather than just being a pathway to get from A to B.

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Materiality

Choosing materials which are sustainable, durable and affordable was important when designing this space. After researching lots of examples of previous social housing in Glasgow, a common theme was poor material choices which lead the buildings to fall into disrepair. The materials used throughout the building are easily maintained, within a reasonable budget as well as being environmentally friendly.

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View Through a Light Void

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Section of the Corridor

Often in new residential buildings, there is a lack of personality with every doorway only being distinguished by a number. To avoid this, and contribute to easy navigation of the building, I chose to incorporate different coloured doors as well as the curved design creating the opportunity to personalise your doorway personal belonging.

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Social Space

To encourage community living, the top floor of the building is a social space which provides entertainment for tenants of all ages. These facilities include a games room, a play area, a gym, a library, a communal laundry and an indoor walkway full of greenery and natural light.

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Indoor Walkway

This indoor walkway is a space for tenants to come and relax or take a walk when the weather isn’t so great. It is flooded with natural light from the large windows that surround the entire top floor and skylights in the roof.

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Gym

As this housing scheme aims to provide people with a healthy life a gym in provided on the top floor to encourage tenants to keep fit and healthy.

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Play Area

Often in flats there is not enough space for young children to run around and play, which can often cause tensions to run high when living in a confined space. This open space with visibility from the walkway allows parents to socialise while keeping an eye on their children playing.

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I am an Interior Designer from the Highlands. I have studied Interior design at The Glasgow School of Art for the past three years. During my studies, I have researched the history of social housing, with a particular focus on Glasgow and have developed a passion for affordable, sustainable and high-quality design that can improve the quality of peoples lives. For my graduate project, I developed a social housing scheme which I named LYCHEE.

LYCHEE Housing stands for Light, You, Community, Health, Education and Environment. Its main goals are to provide tenants with a high quality of life by focusing on sustainable, affordable living that encourages a community spirit and sociable behaviour.

To provide a sustainable, affordable and high-quality environment, a range of energy-saving products and systems can be installed to achieve this.

Internal insulation, new energy-efficient doors, windows, lighting, and water-saving plumbing will be used to increase the energy efficiency of the building to also keep the cost of living and running the flat to a minimum.

Mechanical Ventilation Heat Recovery can be used to improve air quality and keep heating costs down. An MVHR system removes moist stale air and delivers fresh air to a property, in an energy-efficient way. It works by extracting warm, moist air from around the home, putting it through a heat exchanger to extract the heat and then expelling the cool stale air to the outside.

32.7% of households live in fuel poverty. Tumble drying is the healthier option for drying clothes but this is energy-intensive and indoor drying increases mould spore count in homes and can lead to health problems such as asthma and eczema. With a communal laundry room, this allows homes to have better air quality and also save money on energy bills by using the wastewater from washing machines to heat communal clothes dryers and louvre windows to ventilate the space for air drying clothes.

The communal laundry also acts as an opportunity for tenants to socialise and get to know one another encouraging the idea of community living. The focus of social space is considered throughout the building, dedicating the top floor to entertainment for tenants of all generations, in addition to wider corridors, to accommodate the voids through the centre of the building, which provides the corridors with natural light. This decision has been made to bring the sense of the streets indoors, giving peoples doorways personality and also providing a boundary between public and private space with the use of curved walls doubling up as storage on one side and a light void on the other.