Kelvinhaugh Court

A co-operative wanted homes on a yard nobody would insure. We raised the ground floor 900mm and gave the water somewhere to go.

Three steep brick gables in a row against a clear blue sky, one tall window in the middle gable. — The river elevation. Each gable is one stair core and six flats.

Red brick terrace with a stepped central chimney, dark roof tiles and dormer windows above a clipped hedge. — The court side, with the workshop doors behind the hedge line.

Brick apartment gables stepping down a street, white roller blinds on the windows. — The street frontage stepping down with the ground.

Twenty-four co-operative flats over a workshop, on a yard that flooded twice a year.

The site is a former haulage yard between a railway embankment and the river. It had flooded twice a year for a decade, and every scheme before ours had tried to seal it. We did the opposite: the ground floor is a workshop with a swept concrete slab set 900mm above the yard, and the yard itself is a permeable court that is allowed to hold water for a day and let it go.

The flats sit on a 6.4m structural grid, which is the span the precast planks were already made in at the works in Cambuslang. Nothing was cut, and nothing was ordered specially. The section is the argument for the scheme, so we drew it forty times and put it on the front of the planning submission.

The co-operative wanted every flat to be dual aspect and every front door to open onto daylight. Four stair cores, each lit from a rooflight, do that with six flats to a core, and the gables that make the river elevation are simply those four stairs expressed in brick.

Handed over in March 2025, four weeks late and on budget. The workshop is let to a bicycle builder and two joiners, and the rent covers the co-operative’s maintenance fund.

“Three firms told us the yard could not be built on without tanking it. Dunarrow lifted the floor 900mm and let the water come and go. Two winters in, nobody has had wet feet.”

Morag Kerr, Chair of the building committee · Housing co-operative

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