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Following the award winning Glossop Road Building in Sheffield, and spurred on by the success of this project, the client purchased a brown-field site on the outskirts of the Sheffield town centre, within an established inner suburb, adjacent to the general cemetery which is now protected park-land. The existing two storey commercial building was to be demolished, and the site redeveloped to provide a new mixed-residential scheme, with two flexible commercial units.

The site borders the local conservation area to both the south and east, hence was subject to strict conservation requirements regarding its form and choice of materials. The development steps to follow the sloping topography of the site, with the penthouse also set back from the line of the front block, to reduce the apparent mass.

The elevations addressing the conservation area are laid in locally sourced traditional Yorkshire stone, a material that has been widely used in and around the city throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. This solid stone armature in its rough-hewn pitched faced finish, forms the public face of the building, as it wraps its way around the entire development. On the front façade, the large-scale anodised frame windows are set deep within their reveal, accentuating the massing of the material. Once within the courtyard, the materials are of a more striking and modern palette, of white render walls, black stained timber, and pre-weathered zinc, each attempting to be as energy efficient as possible in its build-up.

This high-density project encompasses nine select three bedroom, four-storey townhouses flanking a raised courtyard garden, all above a shared semi-basement car park. Two commercial units, with six apartments and an 180 square metre penthouse above, are all located within a four-storey block that fronts onto Cemetery Road. Each of the components are built around a steel frame superstructure, each with composite steel/concrete in-situ cast floors, and with masonry separating walls.

SHORT STATEMENT

ARCHITECT:

Cemetery Road is a pioneering new build mixed-use scheme

Recent new buildings within the area tend to be generic and poor quality facsimiles of their Victorian context and past. Our intention and aspiration is to provide high quality housing on the basis of a different prototype of that attributed to the area – a secure courtyard / mews type configuration where the principle amenity space (both aesthetic and practical) is provided by the central landscaped courtyard around which the new properties are arranged and from which all are accessed. With the small number of units arranged in this way, the development is intended to promote a strong sense of community.

Of the nine townhouses, there are two house types. Both are designed with dynamic cross sections and make a generous provision of balcony and roof terrace space. The internal arrangements also inform the external language, configured to maximise privacy between neighbours, with the principal habitable rooms of the eastern townhouses facing the staircases and ancillary accommodation of the western townhouses across the courtyard.

Let our suburbs wake up and embrace a more challenging way forward.