This year’s Housing Design Awards presentation took place at Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre in Lambeth on the 4 September. This celebratory evening was also marked by the RIBA Stirling Prize 2025 shortlist being announced that day and Appleby Blue Almshouse in Bermondsey, London - the 2024 Housing Design Awards hosts, Supreme and HAPPI winners - being listed as one of the six projects in the running for the UK’s highest accolade in architecture. See our blog here on how brilliant the Appleby Blue Almshouse is and detail about the scheme on the Housing Design Awards website.
The Housing Design Awards presentation evening was chaired by Joanna Averley, the Chief Planner at MHCLG, who has committed to chair the awards from 2025 to 2029. Amongst this year’s Housing Design Award winners there were exceptional and exemplary schemes demonstrating how development can deliver excellent health and wellbeing. These schemes firstly reminded us that the Housing Design Awards, established alongside the NHS in 1948, was founded with the aim to create healthier indoor environments to improve the health of occupants and secondly, that determinants of health extend beyond our homes and include the places where we live. This blog focuses on two of these schemes and we encourage you to explore the 2025 shortlisted schemes and winners on the Housing Design Awards website.
Hazelmead in Bridport, Dorset - Housing Design Award Supreme Winner
Hazelmead is a community-led project by Bridport Cohousing Community Land Trust (CLT) and it is the largest completed cohousing development in the UK. The CLT was established in 2008, and Barefoot Architects began design work in 2014. Hazelmead is a completed scheme and was completed in September 2024.
The vision for Hazelmead is to address the critical shortage of affordable, sustainable, and community-oriented housing in Bridport, Dorset. Cohousing, a concept originating in Denmark, is a form of community-led housing where residents co-design, build and manage their own neighbourhoods.
The scheme comprises two low-rise apartment blocks containing 14 one-bedroom flats and 39 two-, three-, and four-bedroom terraced houses. All homes are affordable: half the homes are allocated for social rent, half for shared ownership. All are secured at 80% of market value in perpetuity through the CLT.
It is clear to see how health and wellbeing is promoted at Hazelmead within and outside the home:
· Affordable homes offer long term housing stability to residents across all generations.
· High quality, south facing homes are designed to capture surrounding views through large windows, and rooms are, spacious and light due to high ceilings, and vaulted roof spaces.
· The community is resilient to climate change as homes are futureproofed through renewable energy integration and energy efficient design. All-electric homes use photovoltaic arrays connected to a shared community microgrid. This has a lasting impact on energy bills, the environment and well-being.
· Social wellbeing is maximised and isolation and loneliness prevented. Allotments, shared gardens, a community green, outdoor play areas, car free streets, and the fence-free design of front gardens create opportunities for formal and informal social activity. The common house, a community facility at the heart of the scheme where workshops and events take place, brings the neighbours together.
· The community can live an active lifestyle, participating in outdoor food growing, managing the site’s land and green spaces and can easily walk and cycle around the site.
Overall, Hazelmead is a resilient and flourishing intergenerational community – offering a desirable way to live. With such universally desirable outcomes, the next question is, how can we deliver more schemes like this – and it is encouraging to see the BBC asking a similar question too in their article on Hazelmead.
More details on the scheme, including a video can be found on the Housing Design Awards website.
Englishcombe Lane, Bath – HAPPI Award
Englishcombe Lane in Bath, designed by Arcadis for Bath and North East Somerset Council, comprises 16 supported housing accommodation units for individuals with autism, learning disabilities, and mobility issues. Planning permission was granted in September 2024 and the project aims to be completed in February 2027.
The HAPPI award recognises schemes which deliver the Housing our Ageing Population Panel for Innovation’s (HAPPI) 10 key design criteria. Many are recognisable from good design generally - good light, ventilation, balconies and outdoor space, shared facilities and ‘hubs’ – but also design criteria with particular relevance to the spectrum of older persons' housing such as adaptability and ‘care ready design’. Health and wellbeing will be supported at Englishcombe Lane by the scheme being purposefully designed to meet the unique health requirements of residents:
· The site is landscape-led with a range of green and accessible spaces including secluded forested gardens and open meadow areas. The generous amount of varied outdoor space creates a safe, inclusive and tranquil environment and sensory experience for residents.
· Homes have excellent views and outlook by being designed around landscaped communal courtyards and avoid directly facing other homes to create privacy.
· House plans offer flexibility for customisation based on individual needs, including category 2 and 3 accessibility levels and can be adapted in the future to meet care requirements. Homes are designed to reduce the number of doors and lobbies and have two entrances to each room to create better circulation and improve accessibility.
· Homes are all dual aspect with solar shading features. Openable windows and rooflights allow control over natural ventilation.
This scheme successfully designs for the specialist health needs of individuals and supports people to live as independently as possible. We look forward to seeing this scheme being built and occupied in future and more details on the scheme can be viewed here.
Final thoughts…
All of the shortlisted schemes, reviewed in depth and catalogued on the Housing Design Awards website, are a valuable resource for benchmarking housing quality. This year it was especially inspiring to see an exemplary cohousing scheme and specialist housing scheme deliver high quality homes and places to create positive health and wellbeing outcomes. It would be great to see what opportunities there are for more cohousing projects across the UK.
