Challenging convention in Anne Street Garden Villas

Everyone deserves a home to feel proud of. The question is – how can we help social housing residents develop a personal connection with their home? This is the problem we wanted to solve when designing the Anne Street Garden Villas.

To begin designing a new home for a private residential project, we talk to the people who will call the place home. By learning how they live, we can create the perfect spot for that morning coffee ritual, nooks for the kids and spaces for personal interests (like a music room or place to display art, for instance).

Comparatively, when we design high-density commercial projects such as apartments or townhouses, they’re created with a very specific buyer in mind. While we don’t know details such as whether buyers will possess an art collection, we do have a clear idea of whether the developer wants to attract families, downsizers or professional couples.

Designing this way allows us to create homes that feel special and – importantly – safe. But in social housing projects, we rarely have the same opportunity to learn about the residents in such an insightful manner as these other types of residential projects. That means we have to make a lot of assumptions about how the occupants will use their homes, limiting our ability to create a sensitive design response.

Overcoming this barrier is what makes Anne Street Garden Villas such an important project. We were thrilled to have the opportunity to better connect with social housing residents in order to challenge conventional architectural approaches to design.

Here is what we learned.

Two workshops = a whole lot of human connection

In collaboration with Housing Partnerships Office, Building Asset Services and the Office of the Queensland Government Architect, we attended a series of private workshops to ensure our project looks towards the future, rather than what has been done in the past.

These workshops allowed us to engage with a cross-section of residents from two different social housing locations. We walked through the home of a single mother on laundry day and were invited to reframe our thinking of disability by a resident with hearing difficulties, among others.

Participants were also taken through a series of activities designed to shed light on ways their homes could better support their livelihoods and wellbeing. To dive deep, we went beyond the round-circle focus group format and used tools such as prompt cards and drawing activities to allow each individual to fully express themselves. 

The stories we heard added richness to our thinking we could never have achieved in isolation. So we listened and put pen to paper in order to really understand what’s working and what isn’t in the design of affordable housing. It was incredibly heartening to hear participants express how much it meant to have someone sit down and listen to their views.

While we don’t know who will live in Anne Street Garden Villas as yet, the opportunity to speak with tenants who have first-hand experience of social housing allowed us to better understand how their homes can better serve them.

What you can learn from our findings

We are sharing the insights from these workshops in the hope they help to elevate other social housing projects around Australia.

There were many ideas shared in the workshops, which can be loosely categorised into these key themes:

• Community: Car parking is a key consideration for social housing projects, but car parks often take up valuable space that could be used to encourage interaction between residents and bring people together. We were eager to find ways to address both of these concerns.  

• Privacy: While community interaction is important for mental health and feeling secure at home, residents also expressed the need for choice in how they engage with neighbours. Ideas suggested included visual privacy in their homes and private spaces for daily tasks (for example, not being forced to use shared laundry facilities).

• Accessibility: Disabilities vary widely, and our workshops invited us to consider new ways for general social housing units to support the independence of a wider variety of people.

• Adaptability: As society changes, it is vital that social housing does too. Themes including working from home and the changing demographics of social housing residents emerged in the workshop, allowing us to better understand how these homes will be used both now and into the future.

The #1 lesson we learned

When residents were asked to choose the qualities that would mean the most to them in a new development, there was a strong theme of connection with outdoors and the community.

It emerged that in order for residents to feel a sense of belonging at home, they need to feel connected to their immediate surrounds and neighbours.

Following this workshop, we determined the primary challenge for this project: to devise practical ways of creating a village while supporting individual autonomy.

Our visit to existing social housing revealed that simple everyday pleasures – like a small garden with sunlight and drainage, or somewhere to host a barbecue – are lacking. These insights illustrate how social housing can become so much more than a roof and four walls when designed with people in mind (just as we would do in a private residential project).

We’re also thrilled that the success of these process means the Queensland Government is now in the process of establishing a panel of architects to conduct regular research and workshops with social housing tenants.

We’ll be sharing a series of posts over the coming months about how we resolved our findings through design.