There are two arguments for using more compact and diverse house types across a housing layout: to shape distinctive places and to create space for good quality streets and public spaces.
In a typical 00’s layouts the main variations in form are between apartment buildings on corners and large, detached houses on private drives at the edges with more tightly grouped detached houses in between. This doesn’t lead to an efficient use of land or make for an attractive or inclusive place. Alongside this standard approach, biodiversity net gain is achieved by pushing green space to the permitter of the site as a ‘buffer’. A site filled with mainly detached homes can have harsh repetitive streetscapes, lacking in shade and resilient greenery and meaningful internal social spaces.
Proctor and Mathews in their 2023 essay for the RIBAJ set out how important it is to be able to use a diverse range of house types to achieve distinctiveness across a layout and shape places. They quote Gorden Cullen who said, ‘people live in houses but where do the houses live?’.
In their work they begin by looking closely at context and settlement form and develop their concept design ‘in a manner that interprets topography, boundaries, landscape, settlement morphology and local typologies’. Design codes without a clear vision can be: ‘formulaic, illustrating anonymous street sections, prescribing built form configurations that lead to repetitive layouts of perimeter blocks and continuous terraces of back-to-back gardens.’ Instead:
- ‘Start with an analysis of the existing topography, built fabric and landscape patterns as a way to understand the nature and configuration of any strategic landscape and how it informs any proposed site layout.
- Find the potential for spatial connectivity to existing neighbourhood streets and parks by studying the patterns of pedestrian, cycle and vehicle movements.
- Examine historical records – old maps, archaeological surveys, and local place names – can reveal patterns that suggest contextual design narratives.’
When wishing to exemplify this approach several projects come to mind. These each have a thoughtful structure for how building and landscape are organised across the site from its centre to the edge. All these projects have won Housing Design Awards – always a good source of what can work well, where.
- At Abode, Cambridge (1.) by Proctor Matthews ‘gable ends onto green lanes reflecting historic burgage plots’ form part of an arrangement of types where three shifts in morphology and type are skilfully made to shape a square, linking streets and edge lanes.
- John Pardy uses a similar approach at Lovedon Fields, Winchester (2.) where two storey houses with barn like gables facing outwards create a new edge to the village. Here a triangular public green forms the heart of the development and links with greet and blue infrastructure into orchards.
- By creating a compact layout room is also created for landscape features to be drawn into the layout as at Eddington in Cambridge (3.) where houses and apartment buildings can directly access relatively wild spaces on their doorstep. Here again blue infrastructure is a thread that contributes to the intelligibility of the place.
- Instead of fading out to private drives where who belongs where or who owns what can often get confusing Derwenthrope, York (4.) creates clusters of housing that are encircled by multifunctional lanes that also celebrate the site’s cycle accessibility to the city.
- The Avenue Saffron Walden (5.) and the more recent Ashmere, Ebbsfleet (6.) also cluster homes in different ways also making use of rotated gables and in the case of … deploying a wider range of densities of house type as at Abode.
Illustrating these projects together in figure ground also highlights the distinct character that is achieved through the form of the buildings and the relationships between them.
https://www.ribaj.com/intelligence/design-codes-making-place-proctor-matthews
Main image, Wool, Dorset
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October, 2025