Luzborough Romsey,

from Making Better Places: The ADAM Architecture experience of housebuilding and masterplanning

by ADAM Architecture

Wilton Park

Hampshire

CLIENT: The Ashfield Estate,

SCHEME: 56 homes

SITE: 2.4 ha

DATE: Completed in 2019

MASTERPLAN: New Masterplanning

EXECUTIVE ARCHITECT:

ADAM Architecture

The Ashfield Estate faced a difficult decision at the beginning of the 21st century. Volume house builders, land dealers, and planning consultants were making offers to secure and promote parcels of its land around Romsey. To accept would have meant surrendering control. Instead, it wanted to facilitate a development in which it could take pride.

So, it worked with local people to develop a design for the Luzborough site, with two other sites, Hoe Lane and Whitenap, in prospect.

The Estate took guidance not only from engineers and ecologists, planners and architects, traffic consultants and landscape architects, but also from the people who would build the place. While housebuilders take many forms, they know best what will work and what will sell. The Estate undertook a thorough selection process to find housebuilders with the enthusiasm to work hard together to make these schemes possible yet capture the spirit, the heart and the soul of the landowner’s vision.

The Ashfield Partnership is now formed by C G Fry and Son, Morrish Builders, Wyatt Homes and the Ashfield Estate. These three housebuilders are locally based, family owned, well respected craftsmen house builders with the necessary experience and wisdom to help guide the Estate to achieve plans with real integrity.

The heart of the approach is to make places that make sense, delivering settlements to live and to work which suit the lives people might wish to live, as sustainably as possible.

In following both tradition and contemporary practice, the Ashfield Partnership is aiming for schemes which prove to be successful by being popular. Much effort has been made to plan new communities which are not dependent on motor cars although the estate recognises that the advent of battery powered vehicles may permit a change of emphasis.

The Luzborough site is now under construction, being built out by Morrish Builders and Wyatt Homes, and will be complete by the end of 2019. It will be a testing ground to show how traditional building techniques can be successfully adapted in the future.