The building among the towers off Broad Street, and a real photograph of it. The site sits in a designated tall-building cluster, so the height and massing had to justify themselves in street and skyline terms.
The full story
Elevate Property Group held outline planning permission for up to forty apartments on the former Tennant Street car park, a brownfield plot of about a tenth of a hectare in Birmingham city centre, off Broad Street and inside the city's designated tall-building cluster. The outline was won for the site by a previous team. The principle was settled; the building was not.
We were appointed to design it and then to make it buildable: concept, Reserved Matters covering appearance, landscaping, layout and scale, then the detailed design and pre-construction package that turns a consent into something a contractor can price.
Tennant Street is a genuinely hard plot. It is hemmed on all four sides: the street to the front, Stoke Way to one flank, a private access road to another, and the twelve-storey Trident House hard against the south-east boundary. Daylight, privacy and outlook all had to be won rather than assumed, and the city council had been explicit that no principal living-room or kitchen window should face the tower.
So the plan answers that directly. The larger two-bedroom apartments sit to the rear and take their outlook and their balconies off the bedrooms, exactly as required, while the one-bedroom apartments hold the Tennant Street frontage. Everything is arranged off a central circulation spine, and every apartment has a balcony recessed into the brickwork rather than hung off it, which keeps it private, keeps the elevation flat enough to build offsite, and gives the flank its rhythm.
The ground floor earns its keep. A concierge lobby, two retail units giving an active frontage to the street, secure storage for a hundred bicycles, thirteen parking spaces and bin storage turn what had been a dead car-park edge into a working piece of city. All forty apartments survived: fifteen one-bedroom and twenty-five two-bedroom, sixty-five bedrooms in total, across six storeys.
On top of the site came the standards load. Night-time noise off the Broad Street bars and restaurants, a contamination history as a former electrical-appliance works, and a full slate of conditions covering drainage, highways, noise, materials and the oriel-window and mortar details. Birmingham City Council approved the Reserved Matters on 25 May 2017 under reference 2017/01595/PA, with eight conditions.
Then the harder half. We designed the scheme for offsite delivery, around a light-gauge steel building system with a masonry envelope carried over a composite transfer slab on a steel deck. That one decision drove the coordination: transfer levels, masonry support, structural steel balconies, smoke ventilation and the mechanical plant were all resolved with the structural engineer, the quantity surveyor and the approved inspector, so the building could be manufactured and assembled rather than fought out on site. We carried it through condition discharge, building control and a coordinated working-drawing package.
The building is finished and occupied, and the photographs on this page are of it rather than of a render. For a developer the value is direct: a consent held to its full count, a design good enough to have its appearance and layout approved, and a delivery strategy that took the risk out of an awkward city plot.
