Orms revisits 01: Somerset Place

In the first of a series of revisits to early Orms projects with founder Oliver Richards, our newest director Miranda MacLaren uncovers a story of trust, bravery and respect.

20 years ago, Orms first made proposals for the restoration of an entire Grade I-listed Georgian crescent – Somerset Place – in Bath. The crescent is the last in a series of famous terraces that follow the city’s hilly contours. 7 of the original 16 houses were bombed in the second world war. In the 1950s it was taken over by Bath Spa University who inserted modern buildings with extra floors in the bombed areas behind the retained and restored front elevations. They used the generous front parts for teaching, with a zone of bathrooms stairs and lightwells separating the tight floor-to-floor height student accommodation at the rear.

When the university came to sell, developer Stephen Green of Future Heritage saw his opportunity for creating something unique to Bath. He teamed up with a succession of financial backers through the difficult years following the financial crisis of 2008 and eventually Johnny Sandelson brought in new investors in 2014 and the project became real. Stephen’s vision was that these 1950’s buildings with their classical facades could offer horizontal living in a city renowned for its verticality. He knew that to bring it back to life he’d need to create a different style of living behind these wonderful façades rather than returning them to their original configuration. In the end, the project brought together a mixture of lifestyles: seven elegant townhouses, eighteen lateral apartments and maisonettes and an additional end of the crescent house, which is divided into apartments but more importantly, creates an elegant end to the unfinished crescent.

When I went back to Bath to visit earlier this year, we found it pretty much unchanged since completion in 2015 – a testament to the relationship Oliver built with Stephen and the project team.

Know your client, know your team – and know your neighbourhood

I believe that enduring relationships like this are a rarity in architecture. I was touched by the way that both Oliver and Stephen talked about ‘our’ project, and that they had done it together. It was a creative collaboration between deeply trusted partners. A small team with direct relationships between developer, architect and contractor meant that everyone knew what really mattered to each, and all ultimately benefitted.

By building trust with the neighbours in the team’s collective efforts, Stephen’s role became more like that of steward than developer. He was able to take a long-term view – which often conflicted with the advice he was getting from local agents – and develop the adjacent 1950’s teaching buildings to the rear of the property to increase both the commercial and social value of the scheme.

Be respectful and brave

Orms’ original 2007 pitch to the university included 2 key drawings. The first shows the separation of the remaining original houses with the re-building of the garden walls behind the 1950’s element. Oliver and Stephen agreed that Donald Insall as a specialist heritage architect in Bath should restore and repair these, allowing the new owners to act as their own developers within the terms of the building by building listed building consents.

The second is a hand-drawn section showing a stack of 5 interlocking apartments bridging across the lightwells to unite the generous front zones with the minimal heights of the former student rooms at the rear. This confident move – taking a typical pair of townhouses of the type that everyone loves and changing them into lateral apartments – felt to me that it combined the best of the old with the best of the new. In Oliver’s words, “you have to be quite brave to change things – and we knew how to break the rules”.

Then, as now, Orms knew that good reuse relies on working with the grain of the existing building and understanding where it can be re-invented to give it fresh relevance. The constraints and multiple levels of the 1950’s alterations have evolved a third life for these buildings. They minimise structural change, cost and time while enriching the spacial quality of the spaces and creating mezzanines and double height spaces.

It’s good to see that we’re still applying lessons like this in our work. At Custom House, for example, our project for a magnificent new hotel with river Thames frontage, focuses on getting the best long-term use out of a Grade I-listed building. Alterations made when the East Wing was rebuilt in the 1960s after bombing, have actually opened the door for us to make similarly bold and more respectful architectural moves and also provided the critical mix of accommodation which a good hotel needs.

Transferable skills

Visiting Somerset Place, I also saw that Oliver’s commercial experience could be clearly read in the way the apartments were planned. The spaces are efficient and adaptable, designed with a clear eye on the future.

Oliver explains the benefits of this cross pollination between building types, particularly in reuse projects, as a forensic approach. “We’ll look at all the layers of history in a building and simplify them so that they work as effectively – and efficiently – as possible, both now and in the future. No matter the use, we’re always aiming to create nice simple buildings that have an excellent quality of light. It’s the light that gives them humanity.”

Human touch

I saw this human focus in the Somerset Place project. When we visited some of the residents in their homes, I could see how incredibly well-loved it is. The quality of the finish was exceptionally high, but it went much further than that: there was real consideration for how people live their lives. The storage is generous, and the layouts are flexible so people can grow with their home. The main living and dining spaces are flooded with light despite low ceiling heights in some areas. The whole project promotes neighbourliness – the party walls and under floor heating are detailed to minimise sound transmission, and the hillside gardens – which are reached by modern stainless steel and glass bridges are overlooked, but comfortably so. Other architects might have knocked down larger chunks of the building or taken out the floors with low ceiling heights added by the university, but Oliver and his team welcomed what they found rather than fight it.

The benefit of hindsight

Of course, one of the benefits of going back to visit a scheme decades later is that you can see, with hindsight, the things you might have done differently. Oliver, not surprisingly, thinks that they could have been braver and pushed harder with the design. An early proposal to enlarge some of the windows in the rear Stalinesque 1950s elevation, softening it a little by adding balconies looking out onto the gardens, was refused by planners – who subsequently agreed that it was a mistake not to allow it. Terraced houses, after all, tend to have messier compositions at the rear, no matter how formal their front elevation. Apart from that though, and a missed opportunity to turn a nearby lab building into more housing, there was little else he would change.

Heritage assets for social housing?

Soon after I visited Bath with Stephen and Oliver, I went to a conference which looked at ways that heritage assets could be reimagined as social housing. The irony, of course, is that many of these older buildings were built and funded by philanthropists and religious organisations who saw the need to care for those less fortunate. Yet now we hesitate at giving them new uses for fear of them somehow losing their ‘significance’.

Orms’ story at Bath demonstrates that with imagination we can make small moves towards solving an urgent crisis in housing, and this may very well involve the use of heritage buildings – or other stranded assets of any age. It just requires the same kind of vision, bravery and respectful relationship that Oliver and Stephen had.