Designed by Anna O’Gorman Architect, Anne Street Garden Villas is a series of seven social housing dwellings in Southport on the Gold Coast in South East Queensland.
The design was informed by ideas from the firm’s Density and Diversity Done Well Open Idea Competition entry, as well as stakeholder workshops and local social housing design reviews.
Anne Street Garden Villas is one of ten social housing demonstration projects being delivered by a collaborative partnership between Housing Partnerships Office, Building Asset Services, and the Office of the Queensland Government Architect.
The demonstration projects will inform the new design guidelines for future social housing in Queensland.
The partnership encouraged the Anna O’Gorman design team to challenge conventions of social housing.
The historical and more recently created social housing in Queensland left ample room to create a liveable, forward-thinking product that incorporated small design moves that delivered meaningful positive impact for residents.
In high-density social housing developments, tenants rarely feel settled in their own homes.
There are so many small signals – like the large carpark fronting the street to institutionalized signage everywhere – that give the development an institutional feel.
This not only makes it challenging for tenants to feel ownership and pride about their home, but it also creates a divide between the complex and the rest of the neighbourhood.
The Anna O’Gorman design team’s initial feelings about this problem were confirmed via a series of human-centered design workshops.
In these workshops, current social housing tenants revealed a clear desire for nesting and being part of a community, while still having the sense of autonomy we get from a traditional freestanding home.
With these findings in mind, the design team sought ways to make the experience of entering the Anne Street Garden Villas more like that of coming home in the traditional sense.
To facilitate this, they made four key design decisions.
A village of small-scale homes
To guide their thinking, the design team envisaged each residence as a small-scale home nestled within a village. This allowed the integration of a series of subtle cues into the design that gives each home its own identity.
This was achieved by:
- Applying a different exterior colour to each residence, in order gives each home its own distinguishing character.
- Building each dwelling as a stand-alone form.
- Private entrances to street-facing homes, as well as direct access to the shared garden space.
- Low fences between residences to allow for conversation with neighbours, without any intrusion into private space.
These elements are intended to make the complex feel more like a village than a communal living arrangement.
Anna’s team achieved this goal by clearly drawing a line between communal areas and the private perimeter of each home.
Residential street frontage
These small-scale homes face the street, ensuring the development has a direct connection with the neighbourhood. Placing single-level homes at the front of the site and two-level residences at the rear ensure Anne Street Garden does not impose on its surroundings.
This decision was important because the development had to make a positive contribution to its neighborhood. The inviting street frontage will help to foster goodwill and connection between residents and the neighbourhood.
As for the carpark, it was located to the side of the units, so that carports and driveways do not dominate the street frontage.
Multiple modes of access
In developments that lack private modes of access, residents feel as though their comings and goings are on display for the entire complex.
Let’s say you’re feeling unwell and heading to a doctor’s appointment or running late for work, the last thing you want is to have to stop and make small talk with someone crossing your path.
In order to fulfill this need for autonomy and independence, the design team wanted to create a solution that gave residents the ability to mediate how and when they engage with each other.
This was done by introducing entry and exit points away from congregation spaces, in addition to pathways through communal areas.
Own address for tenants
Each home in Anne Street Garden Villas has its own street number, letterbox, and entry.
The Anna O’Gorman team worked with regulators to get an address for each home.
That will help each resident feel a sense of individuality from their fellow tenants.
Cumulatively, the intention of these decisions is to foster independence without sacrificing the connection between all tenants and the rest of the street.
The Anna O’Gorman team believes that everyone deserves a home to feel proud of.
That belief begs the question – how can architects and designers help social housing residents develop a personal connection with their homes?
That was the problem the Anna O’Gorman team sought to solve.
To begin designing a new home for a private residential project, the process typically involves talking to the people who will call the place home.
By learning how they live, the architect 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).
When designing high-density apartment or townhouse projects, they’re created with a very specific buyer in mind.
The developer and their architects don’t typically know specific details like whether buyers will possess an art collection (although this may be known in some instances).
But they generally have a clear idea of whether the project wants to attract families, down-sizers, or professional couples.
Designing this way creates homes that feel special and – importantly – safe.
But in social housing projects, architects rarely have the same opportunity to learn about the residents.
So that means architects have to make a lot of assumptions about how the occupants will use their homes.
And that limits their ability to create a sensitive design response.
That’s why overcoming this barrier for the Anne Street Garden Villas project was so important.
Anna O’Gorman’s team was thrilled to have the opportunity to better connect with social housing residents in order to challenge conventional architectural approaches to design.
Two Workshops with social housing residents
In collaboration with the Housing Partnerships Office, Building Asset Services, and the Office of the Queensland Government Architect, the design team attended a series of private workshops to ensure the project looked towards the future, rather than mimicking historical approaches.
These workshops allowed the design team to engage with a cross-section of residents from two different social housing locations.
The design team walked through the home of a single mother on laundry day and were invited to re-frame 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 well-being.
To dive deep, the design team 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 the design team heard added richness to their thinking that could never have been achieved in isolation.
Anna O’Gorman said, “It was incredibly heartening to hear participants express how much it meant to have someone sit down and listen to their views.”
While the design team doesn’t know who will live in Anne Street Garden Villas as yet, the opportunity to speak with tenants with first-hand lived experience of social housing allowed the team to appreciate how their homes can better serve them.
Anna O’Gorman hopes that sharing findings from this project will help elevate other social housing projects around Australia.
With that intent in mind, the many ideas shared in the workshops can be loosely categorized 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.
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 the workshops invited the design team 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 during the workshops which allowing the design team to better understand how these homes will be used both now and into the future.
The Number One Lesson 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 the 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 surroundings and neighbours.
Following this workshop, the design team determined the primary challenge for this project: to devise practical ways of creating a village while supporting individual autonomy.
Their site visits 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).
Anna O’Gorman and her team are just thrilled that the success of these processes 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.
That’s a big step forward.
Anna O’ Gorman and her team have shone a light on what’s possible here.
The few simple, but well-considered design moves deployed in this project, could help usher in a new era for social housing design across Queensland and beyond.
Bottom line?
In the right location, projects like this are likely to be embraced and enjoy commercial success if offered to the wider market beyond the social housing sector.
This simple yet elegant design delivers what makes people feel at ease in a place.
It’s cost-effective, deploying easy to procure and use building materials.
And there’s no indulgent ornamentation in sight.
Everything you need, but nothing more.
Now that’s worth applauding.
Project Details
Site Area – 1,220 m2
Completion Date – 2021
Building Levels – 2
Project Details
Client
Department of Housing and Public Works with Office of Queensland Government Architect
Architecture
Anna O’Gorman Architect
With 20 years of experience in architecture, Anna has developed the professional confidence necessary to engage in a practice that is characterized by curiosity rather than a prescriptive methodology.
Landscape Architecture
Lat27 Design Studio
LatStudios is an award-winning multidisciplinary design collective. Their design culture is drawn from a shared appreciation that the success of a place – regardless of scale or function – is fundamentally determined by responsiveness to environment and context.
Structural Engineer
Westera Partners
Westera Partners is a highly respected Consulting Engineering Firm practicing Australia-wide in the disciplines of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering.
Town Planning
Bennett + Bennett
Bennett + Bennett has been providing advanced Surveying, Town Planning, and Spatial solutions for over 50 years. Established in 1968 on the Gold Coast, the firm has played a significant role in key projects and areas of development legislation that have helped shape South East Queensland.
Construction
Nano Constructions
Photography
Christopher Frederick Jones
Christopher is an experienced architectural and interiors photographer based in Brisbane, Australia.
Photo Gallery
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Design © 2021 Anna O’ Gorman Architect. All Rights Reserved.| Images © 2021 Christopher Frederick Jones. All Rights Reserved.
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