REAL PROJECT
GROUP CUSTOM BUILD
For four city households, their self-build dream started when they agreed to build a block of flats together
LOCATION Edinburgh
BUILD TIME August 2016 – August 2017
CONSTRUCTION SYSTEM Cross laminated timber (CLT) structural frame
SIZE 498m² (total of all four flats)
PLOT COST £250,000 (June 2015)
BUILD COST £883,197 (for all four flats)
CURRENT VALUE Not known
Finding plots in any city is a challenge, especially so in Edinburgh where vacant plots are as rare as hen’s teeth. So when architect John Kinsley found a small slither of brownfield site sandwiched between two period buildings, he was intrigued. Could he buy the site — and find other households to join him in building a block of flats on the plot?
“We were living in the next street at the time, and I could see that the site had been vacant for a long time,” he explains. “So I got in touch with the owner of the land, who was open to the idea of selling it. I then put an advert on a local community website to see if anyone was interested in being part of a collective project. We had 18 people at the first meeting and over four or five months, we got down to four households, including ours.”
GROUP EFFORT
“We spent a lot of time discussing whether we wanted to go down the co-housing route – where we’d share communal space – and no one really wanted that,” continues John. “We all wanted the traditional tenement model, with each flat individually owned and everyone making their own decisions about what kind of flat they wanted.”
The group also spent a lot of time talking about how sustainable they wanted to the build to be. “People were keen to push boundaries in terms of building,” he says. “So we’ve built up to Passivhaus principles with a very well-insulated and airtight structure.”
John says that getting the modern tenement block through planning proved to be a remarkably smooth process. “And the neighbours were pretty much on board with it, too,” he adds.
