The villa as restored, and a real photograph of it. Keeping and converting it was not optional: the conservation area decided that before anyone drew anything, and it set the terms for the two new forms behind.
The full story
The site was a large period villa on Kenilworth Road, last used as a care home, with an older dwelling behind it and the whole plot inside the Leamington Spa Conservation Area. A full permission was already in place, won for the site by a previous team, and it allowed an ambitious mix: three apartments inside the converted villa, four new townhouses where a rear wing would come down, and a contemporary detached house replacing the dwelling at the back.
What Space GK needed next was different work. A permission describes a scheme; it does not detail one, and it does not survive contact with a commercial plan unchanged. The developer appointed us to refine and detail the scheme for construction, to win the changes the plan demanded, to discharge every condition, and to stay on the project through the build and certify the homes for sale.
On the rear of the site the job went further than delivery. The replacement dwelling, Plot 8, we redesigned from scratch as a contemporary house with a basement and a front lightwell, and carried from first concept to handover. That is one building of the eight, and it is the one on this page's opening image. The apartments and the townhouses in front of it were designed by others; our work there was to make them buildable and to get them signed off.
Every move had to answer to the conservation area. Facing and roofing materials, window reveals, changes to the elevations: all of it had to satisfy the council's heritage policies before anything could be built, and the villa itself had to be kept and converted rather than lost. The materials that came out of that were Petersen D46 handmade brick and RHEINZINK graphite-grey standing-seam zinc, approved in December 2017 and used across the new work.
We secured the changes the scheme needed through two Section 73 consents. The first, W/17/2402, approved our redesign of the replacement dwelling as the basement-and-lightwell house, together with elevation and fenestration changes to the apartments. A non-material amendment followed in February 2019 for the additional zinc rooflights to the townhouses. The second, W/19/0888, granted in August 2019, added the single-storey garage to Plot 8, picked up the rebuilt brick boundary wall, and removed the open-space contribution condition that stood between the homes and occupation.
Alongside them we discharged the conditions one at a time: the facing and roofing materials, the large-scale window-reveal details for the villa, the hard and soft landscaping, the boundary brickwork, and the bat-mitigation measures that a pre-commencement condition required after protected bats were recorded on the site. We produced the full working drawings and construction details, including the standing-seam zinc cladding and the basement waterproofing the contemporary house depended on, and coordinated the structural engineer, the waterproofing specialists and the steelwork.
Then we stayed, which is the part that is easy to promise and harder to do. We resolved the detailing the build threw up, supported the developer remotely through the early part of 2020, and issued the Professional Consultant's Certificate for each home as it reached practical completion. The first purchaser moved in during the summer of 2019, and the development was marketed and sold as Victoria Court.
For the developer the value was a single accountable design partner who turned a consented site into completed, saleable homes. We came in to deliver somebody else's permission, designed the standout house on the site on top of that, and handled the council, the conditions and the build so the development team could get on with selling.
