Market Place

Project description

The Fruit Market is a 6-storey high density and highly constrained urban infill project in Southampton’s medieval town centre and involved an innovative use of a former burgage plot at the rear of a listed building, mixing flats, penthouses and stacked duplex units with deck access, and achieves an impressive 375DPH.

The scheme provides 34 one- and two-bedroom flats and duplex units. The design responds creatively to the character and context of both the adjoining regeneration site and historic fabric. The narrow site’s potential was realised through a combination of traditional flats and a triple stack duplex design that allowed highly efficient deck access every second floor. This enabled south facing balconies to occupy the alternate floors and ensured every property benefited from dual aspect living accommodation.

Challenges we overcame:

The site was highly constrained and narrow. We had to work creatively with limited glazed areas and carefully map distances to the relevant boundary in order to maximise the quality and quantity of residential development.

Planning policy height limitation restricted development to 4 floors and was making development viability difficult. We designed a stacked duplex typology with a partial basement and rooms in the roof and supported the application with a comprehensive contextual analysis. By engaging proactively with the Design Review Panel, we were able to secure support for 6 floors of development.

Part way through the planning process our clients entered into a Joint Venture with an RSL and we were required to update and amend the layouts to achieve their specific spatial and technical requirements. We achieved this despite the highly constrained parameters, and subsequently negotiated support from the case officer for the amended scheme by demonstrating that there was no worse impact on adjoining properties.