Project
Kimberley House Apartments
Two past planning permissions, and not one home to show for them. Here's why it pays to use architects that understand viability.
Kimberley House is a dead building on a living street. A cinema, once. Then light industrial storage, and you can tell: flat roof, pebble-dash, and a footprint far too big for the Victorian terraces either side of it. The back wall leans over the James Street gardens like it's reading the residents' post. By the time Elite Developments took it on, the site already had residential consent twice over: one approval for 14 flats converted from the shell, one for a three-storey block of 12 supported-living flats.
Homes built: none.
type
Commercial Residential
Client
Elite Developments Derbyshire
status
Planning Pending
location
Nottinghamshire
Services
Architectural Design
Interior Design
Planning
3D Visualisation
The Diagnosis
The conversion approval didn't stack up. Turn an industrial box this size into decent one-beds and you'll spend more than the one-beds are worth around here. The supported-living approval needed a care provider, CQC registration and public funding, which is a tall order for a small developer buying a site at their own risk. Two real permissions, then. But also two dead-ends.
Elite Derbyshire Developments keep and run what they build rather than flipping it, and on this site that leaves exactly one product standing: plain general-needs apartments, the only kind an owner can fund, fill and hold without a grant or a care contract. So that's what we designed.
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The Design
Out goes the shoebox. In comes a 2.5-storey building: 14 apartments, 12 one-beds and 2 two-beds, all meeting or beating national space standards. Double gables front and back pick up the terrace roofline sensitively. The rear steps back as it climbs, easing the wall that's loomed over James Street for decades. Parking tucks underneath, off the frontage and out of the way. Stone bays and string courses nod to the older houses along the street, and stop a good way short of fancy dress.
The Outcome
We took it to Broxtowe Borough Council at pre-application stage. The officer backed the principle of homes here, called the massing, scale and height acceptable, preferred our gabled roof to the flat-roof factory that already stands, and judged the layout and design right at 2.5 storeys. The conservation officer had only limited concerns about the Conservation Area.
It wasn't a rubber stamp, which is the part worth trusting. The three-storey idea we floated got a polite no: too prominent for the street, and better settled now than after the cheque's cashed. The rear windows onto James Street need careful handling, and the raised rear terrace has to be designed so nobody can stand on it and survey the neighbours. Parking, a transport assessment, a bit of contaminated ground, a few contributions: all live, all ordinary, all very fixable.
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