Vassall Road housing, London by Tony Fretton Architects

When the Venice Biennale opens this weekend (14 September-23 November), the work of five architects will go on show at the British Pavilion. The hot-ticket event is like a big-budget architecture degree show – earnest, thoughtful, well-presented – except countries rather than students display their best efforts. Every architect with big ambition wants to be involved and, this time, Tony Fretton Architects is one of the lucky five.
This year, the British Pavilion highlights the 'peculiar conditions' of British housing provision. Curator Ellis Woodman chose Fretton's firm because it has residential schemes in both England and Europe. However, Fretton's recently completed Vassall Road housing and medical centre in Lambeth, south London, won't be shown in Venice. It's a curious omission. Instead, his Red House, a one-off luxury dwelling for an art collector  in London, will feature alongside a commercial-residential complex for Frederiksgade Square in Copenhagen.

Vassall Road is a joint venture by developer Baylight Properties – headed up by the design-obsessed and architecturally trained Crispin Kelly – and Servite Housing Association. The 'peculiar conditions' of housing provision in London – if not the UK – are evident here, both in the design of communal space and, given that it was way over budget and several months late, its tortuous road to completion. Throw an unimaginative and stubborn planning department into the mix and you should be looking at a shoo-in for Woodman's show.
Fretton's housing is on the north side of Vassall Road, on a site previously occupied by a pub. The three- and four-storey terrace consists of 10 for-sale apartments – seven two-storey maisonettes and three flats – placed above a medical centre which occupies most of the ground floor. The centre was built for doctors who had outgrown their basement practice in a neighbouring villa, and its sale funded the housing build. The plan for the centre – a corridor, with offices on either side, which leads off a large reception space – was governed by a health consultant; consequently Fretton has little to say about it.
Kelly is one of a handful of developers in the UK who are committed to bringing quality to everyday housing – he wants to make homes that are spacious, elegant, transitional. 'We've built a terrace because we're more interested in building houses than flats,' says Kelly. 'We hope it will appeal to small families, young couples and retired couples, or people who want to work from home.' The idea is to create an occupied development, one that is lived in throughout the day, rather than obsess over density (it's 84 units per hectare). The busy medical centre is obviously key to keeping the site buzzing all day.
The scheme was constrained by the daylighting angles of the Church Manor housing estate to the rear – a Clifford Culpin & Partners design dating from 1971 – and local-authority building lines. It has a simple form with a clearly defined elevation; large windows above even larger glazed doors, which open on to deep, wide balconies. If you were to whizz by in a car you'd think it a little dull, but the pedestrian's experience is much richer. Walking by, you can see how the elevation has been enlivened by Fretton's choice of brickwork; handmade, clamp-fired Rudgwick Red Roughs, to be precise. These low-cost bricks have been transformed with a thin wash of Keim's black mineral paint.
When the sun shines, the richly textured, gnarled surface is at its best. If you're an architectural fetishist, you'll struggle not to reach out and touch it. The elevation feels both old and new: the subtle purplish hue mimics the 19th-century brickwork of the villas opposite, while its clean lines reference the '70s Modernism of Clifford Culpin's estate.
At its east end, on the corner of Vassall Road and Holland Grove, the building steps up one storey. A mature tree sits in front of  this 'tower', as Kelly and Fretton call it, and, taken together, the composition firmly anchors the development in the neighbourhood. Kelly takes credit for the decision. 'When we had a monolithic block, I felt it was too tough.'
Fretton says that the spaces created on the street by the neighbouring buildings influenced his scheme's relationship to Vassall Road. Like Church Manor, the villas – which date from 1830 – are set back from the street, protected by trees, black-painted railings and plots of grass. Fretton's scheme is also set back. A narrow strip of garden sits behind sturdy, grey painted railings, which have been embedded within a thin line of granite setts raised above the level of the concrete paving slabs. 'You might not notice these details at first,' says Fretton, 'but if you took them away the paucity would be apparent. Sometimes it's the details that make cities bearable, rather than the big moves.'
You enter the building through a double door at the base of the tower on Holland Grove, around the corner from Vassall Road, and are greeted by your own reflection in the utilitarian lobby. A few metres in is a mirror-polished stainless-steel 'wall' hiding a meter cupboard – a simple idea that works. The lobby is brighter than you expect and seems big. There is a lift, but most visitors will take the terrazzo stairs – it's only one storey up to a deck at the rear of the building which gives access to each of the maisonettes.
The space has been subdivided into seven small patios – each around 3 x 2m – with heavyweight railings and external storage leading off a narrow lane. Square-cut bay windows are ranged along the elevation, below which are glazed kitchen doors, and another that leads into a hall to the staircase.
On the ground floor, between the new-build and Church Manor estate, is a landscaped garden for healthcare workers and residents of the new-build and the estate. There are benches, saplings, and flower beds. It's a pattern I would have liked to see applied to the first-floor deck. Fretton says it was a positive decision to cellularise the space, for functional reasons and because it appeals to the English and their romantic view of domestic space.
In a move that recalls Fretton's Fuglsang Art Museum in Denmark (AJ 27.03.08), the brickwork on the back wall has been painted white. Fretton says it provides a brighter prospect for the housing opposite, but also creates a 'different feeling'. The feeling is partly drawn from Fretton's own romantic sensibilities. 'It's just much more like a garden,' he says.
Despite the sense of self-contained 'homes', notions of privacy should be dismissed; the entire deck is overlooked by Church Manor. Earlier designs show that Fretton did consider an elevated communal garden – complete with trees – and Kelly suggests communal space is housing's 'most interesting question', and one Baylight is keen to answer. 'In the future we will definitely focus on providing communal space,' says Kelly, who adds that, unlike terraces, a block of flats naturally has shared spaces managed through community participation.
Housing in parts of Europe could provide several models to play with, but Kelly is  more interested in oddball moments in England's past as a source of inspiration. He cites The Lane in Blackheath, south-east London – a 1963 project by Eric Lyons' design-and-build firm Span. 'We've really learned from it since we designed Vassall,' he says. But the cellular arrangement does focus Fretton's clear domestic planning: you can see right the way through the kitchen doors to the living room, balcony and Vassall Road beyond.
Moving inside, the Leicht Amica kitchen is of high quality and so is the American white oak flooring. Velfac doors open out on to steel balconies which are almost as wide as the living room itself. It's a far cry from what we expect of typical speculative builds.
Skylights with Velux windows sit above both the hall and the bathroom upstairs. A south-facing bedroom has a bathroom en suite, while the north-facing bedroom's bay window is opaque, to satisfy the residents opposite. The flats have a similar arrangement of rooms throughout, but the bedrooms both face east and have clear glass in the windows.
Fretton's design ticks all of Kelly's boxes. It's obsessed with materiality; it has a tightly planned layout and an eye for proportion; there is a sense of transition and a hierarchy of spaces. It's good housing, and offers a fresh perspective on the urban terrace. But, while dwellings are spacious, at 84m2 for the maisonettes and 79.5m2 for the flats, they are hardly breaking records. As Woodman wrote in a Daily Telegraph article discussing his show: 'The average size of a new-build UK house is 76m2, compared with 132m2 in Denmark.'
Building the project was quite a struggle. Using a traditional contract, Durkan Pudelek (now known as Concentra), which tendered a mid-priced bid, was selected. Not quite  an artisan builder in the manner of, say, Rooff, which built Sergison Bates' Garrett Lane scheme in south London for Baylight, it does have a reputation for quality. Fretton is fair to Durkan and says the scheme is well constructed – it just took a lot longer than planned. On site in October 2006 and completed in June this year, it was eight months late. And at around £1,800 per square metre, it is almost double the price Kelly had hoped for.
My feeling is that the contractor looked at the simple specification – a steel frame on a concrete deck, with loadbearing masonry walls and brick and block party walls – and thought it could get on with the job without guidance. Fretton is unwilling to discuss the matter in detail, as the bill is still to be settled, but he will say that the brickwork – the textural qualities of which were picked apart in the architect's studio – had to be taken down several times. 'The architect-contractor relationship is still adversarial,' he says.
'The long wrangle' (Kelly's term) with planners saw several schemes rejected before the design-as-built was approved. Fretton initially proposed more adventurous schemes. One was a storey taller and had two walkways wrapped around a courtyard. But he realised planners had 'lost the plot' when they questioned why he wanted more dwellings on the site. 'It was an incredible moment,' he says. 'Aren't we all supposed to be trying to build more homes?' And unlike the problems faced by Sergison Bates (also showing in Venice) with its Parkside development in north London (AJ 14.08.08), inconsistency with jobbing planners wasn't the issue. 'Unfortunately, one officer stayed throughout the project, ad nauseam, ad exhausteam!' says Fretton.
Kelly's ambition is to use the architect's intellectual capital in ordinary housing. That Fretton's creative energies were so distracted during what should have been a simple project – by planners apparently confused by his approach and a contractor wary of his input to the construction process – is hardly a clarion call for Britain's best to get involved in housing provision. Perhaps it's not something we should be shouting about in Venice, after all.

See the ground and first-floor plans
See the second and third-floor plans

Click to listen to the talk

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