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knotty ash

care and community are at the heart of this retrofit

Knotty Ash is a careful refurbishment of two existing 1960s tower blocks, to create 40 residential care apartments for the elderly and new communal facilities in Liverpool. The award-winning scheme created a strategy that unites the whole site, utilising the analogy of a village with streets and a central green.

Apartments within the existing tower blocks are linked with the new sheltered housing apartments constructed either side of an internal street. Both elements converge at the central communal hub. This design helps to overcome the common institutional characteristic of this type of development, through a more domestic external street scale. The internal street is designed as a common meeting place from which to enter individual dwellings.

The buildings are proof that there is no need to resort to institutional orthodoxy in designing housing for this social group.

Client:

Liverpool Housing Action Trust/Housing 21

Location:

Liverpool

Size:

  • 40 apartments

Contract value:

£4.5 million

Status:

Complete

“…just because we are elderly, does not mean we want to live in something that looks like an old people’s home.”

Vera Critchley, Resident

“…a recent project in liverpool by shedkm suggests how much the architect’s imagination can bring to housing for elderly people. in particular, it shows that there is no need to resort to institutional orthodoxy in designing housing for this social group.”

Architecture Today