Re-use of the Victorian House

This is an interesting article on a project carried out re-using the Victorian houses. The brick is stripped naked and left to have it's natural effect. The added materials in the house are all natural to further embrace the birck.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/greenproperty/8447628/Welcome-to-Britains-first-carbon-neutral-Victorian-home.html

Basement Extension

As I was thinking about ways of creating more space in the new concept of the interior of a terraced house, I started thinking about utilising the basement. In researching this I came across this example by Jan Kattein Architects. They have expanded the basement to go underneath the front courtyard and created gladd openings to allow more natural light into the basement.

For more information click here

Materials and Construction of Victorian Terraced Houses

Research from 'Investigating Old Buildings' Lance Smith, Batsford Academic and Educational London 1985

TIMBER FRAMES AND JOINT

When originally built the roof structure was known to consist of several 'bays'. Bays are the units defined by cross frames. They are any size depending on the purposes of the rooms they were creating. Today viewing the bay divisions may give us an idea of what the original space division had been even when the spacing below has been completely altered.

There are various ways in which timbers may be connected to each other. the diagram below shows some of the ways most commonly used in the construction of the timber roof frames.

Research from Vicotorian Terraced Houses in Lancaster

Keeping the Shell - Changing the Interior

http://www.archdaily.com/13738/ternat-house-v-bureau-vers-plus-de-bien-etre/

This is the Ternat House, designed by the architects V+ bureau vers plus de bien etre, built in Belgium.

The architects take a house in a typical urban area where all the houses have very precise guidelines as to how they must be built and regulations the facade must have.

The architects decided not to argue with the regulations of the authorities, but to work with them, in them. They proposed a different interior world, free of its exterior shell.

20th Century Domestic Life

This website shows different changes that have taken place in the 20th Century, such as the invention of electricity and the change in art and design and fashion.

20th Century Domestic Life

19th Century Victorian Domestic Middle Class Life

This site shows the different areas of a typical 19th century Victorian townhouse.

19th Century Domestic Life

"New homes in old houses" Chimney Pot Park

Urban Splash worked on a project called the Chimney Pot Park - which is a community of multi-award-winning upside down houses in Langworthy, Salford. The best bits of the classic Victorian terrace redesigned, your very own, very modern Coronation Street. Homes with parking and private roof terraces.

They kept the best bits of the original Victorian terraces - the size, the shape, the roof, the front door, the streets, but with the help of architects shedkm, the insides are something altogether new. They turned the inside of the terraced house upside-down. Living space and kitchens on the upper floors with the bedrooms downstairs, a new balcony and terrace and secure parking lot have also  been added.

For more information visit http://www.urbansplash.co.uk/gallery/chimney-pot-park

The site before

The site after renovation

Regeneration to Welsh Street

This link explain and shows the regeneration on Welsh Street http://welshstreethomesgroup.posterous.com/

This project is carried out by WSHG, who are a group of residents who reject demolition in favour of repair to deliver solid eco friendly homes. They are joined by people hoping to renovate re-populate, and invigorate the wasted Welsh Streets in Liverpool. The Welsh Streets is an area of around 450 terraced houses next to Liverpool’s Princes Park.The fight to save hundreds of homes in Liverpool’s Welsh Streets from demolition has lasted 7 years so far.

SAVE Britain's Heritage

SAVE Britain's Heritage is an organisation that has been campaigning for historic buildings since its formation in 1975 by a group of architects, journalists and planners. SAVE is a strong, independent voice in conservation, free to respond rapidly to emergencies and to speak out loud for the historic environment.

They have saved many Victorian terraced houses from being demolished and are working hard with other architects to find solutions to reinvent these existing houses to make them last another century.

More information on SAVE by following this link http://www.savebritainsheritage.org/index.php

Another Project by Save Britain's Heritage

Toxteth Street in Openshaw


Save Britain's Heritage and Mark Hines Architects worked together once again on finding a way to refurbish 550 homes instead of them being demolished.

The new plan highlights the flexibility of the existing Victorian houses by joining, extending and modifying individual units to create family homes of up to four bedrooms with their own gardens.

Other ideas include giving residents the choice of a number of possible 'add-ons' to their properties, each offering a different living arrangement, with re-landscaped outdoor spaces.

William Palin, Secretary of SAVE, said: "Judged on community benefits, environmental impact and cost, rehabilitation and refurbishment is clearly the way forward.

"It is less destructive, helps preserve the existing community, saves money and offers revitalisation without losing the enduring qualities of these characterful and much-loved terraced streets.

"With good, imaginative design, these houses can be easily adapted to offer the variety of housing which the Pathfinder agencies say is required for the area."



Proposed plan for Toxteth Street

All above information taken from this link - http://menmedia.co.uk/northeastmanchesteradvertiser/news/s/1062685_plan_drawn_up_to_save_homes

Derelict Victorian Terraced Houses

Today there are thousands upon thousands of houses lying empty – nearly three quarters of a million in England alone, where at the same time there are so many families who are in need of homes. In the Midlands, North East and North West, there are streets of derelict Victorian terraces; boarded up, their roofs stripped of lead, the elements slowly doing their destructive work. In the past few years, 16,000 period terraces have been bulldozed to the ground and only 3,000 new homes have been rebuilt to replace them.

For the source of this information please visit this page.

Saving Terraced Houses

This problem is being looked at Save Britain's Heritage. They have asked the architects Mark Hines to find a solutions to make these houses desirable and suitable for today's modern lifestyle.

Mark Hines Saving Terraced Houses Project

The changes involve the additional of extra roof and floor insulation, LED lighting and a new boiler. These will become low-energy low-bill homes and will cost considerably less than building a new house.

“We have developed about 10 different rear extension types,” says Hines. “Some have first-floor balconies, others ground-floor porches; they come prefabricated with all services and, by providing extra space for two good-size bedrooms plus a bathroom upstairs, will give these homes a new life.”
He says the beauty of this solution is that because streets of period terraces – some several hundred houses long – are all identical, it would be simple and cost-effective to refurbish entire streets en masse.

The extensions are made from timber frames filled with a lime and hemp mixture. Hemp has a high thermal mass, so is an excellent eco-building material and grows extremely fast, sucking up carbon dioxide as it grows. Its potential as a low-cost green building material has led to hemp making a comeback to British agricultural land, with more than 3,000 acres, mostly in East Anglia, now under cultivation.

Follow this link to read more about 'Saving Terraced Houses - Mark Hines'

The Chosen Site

Terraced Houses on Bushell Pl, Preston

These are a row of Victorian Style terraced houses, which were built in the 19^th century during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Form and Structure

Strengths: materials used are of good quality and have a very long life-span, it is 60% cheaper to maintain a Victorian house over 30 years that in is to build and maintain newly built houses (as per the 2005 English Heritage report Low Demand Housing and the Historic Environment).

Weaknesses: they are small inside, with very small rooms but high ceilings. The layouts tend to have a lot of corridor divisions which don’t have windows and are very dark. The staircases are very steep and narrow.  They are all the same, or have very slight variations.

Opportunities: it is important to realise that people will continue living in these houses for years to come, so there is a lot of room for creative design to make the living environment suit the modern world we live in and make the most out of the outer shell that has been present and will be present for years.

Problems: improvements are limited as the houses are crowded together in rows and there is no room for expansion. They were built near city centres, often on or near main roads, where people don’t want to live, so they have been converted to shops. 

Initial Proposal

"Come Home"

This past summer I worked in an interior design company that mostly focuses on designing the interior of residential houses and I really enjoyed that! When I started thinking about the Honours project and looking around at the potential sites, I decided that I wanted to choose something that is very particular to England and very different to anything I am used to seeing where I come from. The English terraced houses were something very unusual for me when I first came to England. I was shocked when I saw a whole street of identical houses side by side one another without any gaps between them! I was also intrigued that these houses were built in the 19th Century, during the reign of Queen Victorian and are still lived in today.



Photo I took when I first came to England to send my parents to show them terraced houses.

 

My initial idea was to use about 4 or 5 of these attached houses, and combine them into one space, a shop. From the outside there will still be 4 doors, the customer can enter from any one of them, and on the inside the space will be completely changed with connecting paths and bridges linking the 4 houses into one space with showrooms. The shop will be a furniture shop, where there will be show rooms recreating different parts of residential houses. There won’t need to be a lot of storage as the products would be ordered from catalogues. The aim of this is for average people who would like to make their homes to be beautifully designed, to show that it’s not out of reach for ordinary people.  I was thinking the name of it would be ‘Come Home’.

 

This reflects the theme 'time and memory' as the home is a place where people spend so much of their lives in, and witness all the changes: babies are born, grow up, have their own families. As these houses are around 100 years old, several generations have passed through them. The houses themselves tell the tale of lives that have gone on within them, the changes that the people who lived in them have done. As we live in the 21st century, we don't have to live in the past of these houses, just as changes have undergone already they can continue happening. The aim of my project is to :

• show people just how much can be done with the interiors of these houses to suit our modern lives
• to encourage reinvention of the interiors of these houses instead of building new ones
• to show the transitions of the past in these houses
• to surprise visitors - as they see the exterior they expect the interior to be a certain way because thatis what they are used to and associate with, but this does not have to be that way.

The outer shell remains the same, but the interior is changing.

 

Initial drawing to suggest the project proposal.