Projects / Personal Experience
Experience on retirement living developments at Box Architects and earlier at Darnton B3, including developments of approximately £12m and up to 60 homes. The work covered early-stage site and feasibility thinking, topographical modelling, cut-and-fill and retaining implications, planning-stage drawing coordination and Revit workflow improvement.
Personal involvement with McCarthy & Stone retirement living developments, at Box Architects and, on earlier developments, at Darnton B3.
The projects recorded in the CV include developments of approximately £12m and up to 60 homes. Individual developments, employer allocation, project-specific responsibilities and dates are still being compiled, so the material below describes the type of work involved rather than the detail of any single scheme.
Retirement living schemes are frequently brought forward on constrained sites, where the developable area is shaped by existing levels, boundaries, access, drainage and the surrounding residential context before any building form is fixed.
The early-stage work on these projects was concerned with testing whether a site could accommodate the required accommodation and external space, and with understanding those constraints well enough to inform the development of the layout.
A great deal of the technical risk on a sloping or constrained site sits in the relationship between the building, the external levels and the site boundary. Getting that relationship wrong early affects drainage, access, retaining structures and the extent of external works.
The approach taken was to build the site information into the Revit model — survey levels, existing ground, boundaries and adjoining features — so that the building could be tested against the site as a whole rather than in isolation.
Early-stage 3D site modelling was introduced across the McCarthy & Stone projects so that site-level constraints could be identified earlier, findings presented to the client and development teams, and practical design responses developed to help maintain site viability.
Where a site is not level, the finished floor level and the arrangement of the external works determine how much ground has to be removed or imported, and where retaining structures may be required.
Modelling the site in three dimensions made it possible to review cut-and-fill implications and the resulting retaining requirements as part of the design process, and to understand how changes in level would affect the layout and the boundaries.
Planning submissions for the retirement living team required a coordinated set of general arrangement plans, elevations, sections, site and location plans, together with the supporting design and access material needed to describe the proposals clearly to the determining authority.
The drawings had to be consistent with one another and with the design information already issued — levels, setting out, accessibility and the relationship between the buildings and the surrounding area — as the proposal moved through the planning stage.
Planning and technical drawing packages for residential buildings also have to align with the fire strategy. The arrangement of compartments, the protected escape routes and the positions of fire doors and associated details all depend on the architectural layout being settled and correctly shown.
The work therefore included coordinating architectural drawings with fire strategy information so that the two sets of information agreed — a drawing coordination task as much as a design one.
At Box Architects the work with the McCarthy & Stone team also included improving the Revit workflows and drawing coordination used on the projects, within the practice’s BS EN ISO 19650 aligned processes.
In practice this meant making the model and the drawing set a more reliable basis for coordinated delivery: consistent templates and drawing standards, drawing production that followed the information already established in the model, and coordination of the architectural information with the other design disciplines.
The underlying point is straightforward. Improved workflows reduce the amount of effort spent finding and correcting inconsistencies, and allow more of the technical time to be spent on the design itself.
This body of work shows experience of early-stage site and feasibility thinking on constrained residential sites, topographical and level modelling, an understanding of cut-and-fill and retaining implications, planning-stage delivery to a consistent standard, fire strategy drawing coordination and the improvement of Revit workflows for a larger project team.
Open to Technical Lead, Associate-level, fixed-term, contract and selected consultancy appointments.