Mews Houses, Camden Conservation Area

WWA designed and delivered five mews houses for Origin Housing within the Camden Conservation Area. These new private residential houses are located to the rear of a retirement housing redevelopment scheme, Ashton Court – Retirement Housing, designed and delivered by our specialist designers. The Mews House site was offered up for sale to fund the upgrade and remodelling of the retirement housing.

The Mews Houses were designed to maximise natural light and took a ‘fabric first approach’ to sustainability. WWA was responsible for securing planning permission at the site and navigated difficult Conservation Area constraints.

Mews houses as a typology are always challenging in terms of their immediate relationship to the street. The building’s façade is the threshold between public and private, unlike ‘typical streets’, which benefit from semi-private garden space in front. The challenge with a mews house design is to achieve a sense of privacy through clever fenestration design.

Any project located in a conservation area has an additional layer of complexity. In essence, a conservation area seeks to preserve the historic continuity and interpretability of a given location. This aspiration can be applied at the micro and macro scales ranging from jurisdiction over the types of bricks used, to the way the proposal engages with the wider area. The Royal Institute of British Architects maintains a register of chartered members who have specialist knowledge of conservation. Similarly, the AABC maintains a membership of Architects accredited in building conservation. If you are putting together a consultant team for a project in a Conservation Area, do remember to budget for these expertise even from the very outset when it might be required to undertake a Heritage Appraisal to inform the feasibility of a future development. At WWA we maintain this expertise in-house and have a substantial portfolio of heritage projects to draw expert knowledge from, which you can view at our Heritage Project page by clicking here..