Former Nestle Factory Housing, Hayes, London, UK

Block B comprises 9 buildings surrounding a podium garden. It has frontages on Canal Street, Sandow Square, Milk St and Coffee Park. Although all the buildings have distinct characteristics, they are bound together both by a podium carpark, with parking below and by a common architectural language, albeit enriched with numerous variations in response to character and context.

The existing factory buildings have inspired the design, both in terms of their muscular scale and detail, and their accreted, partially unplanned complexity.

Block B is therefore broken up into a series of elements and layers, each of a different brick tone. A set of hierarchies and differences is created from base to middle to top, and from one frontage to another; to give each part of the project a distinctive character and to achieve a balance between diversity and unity, including harmonies across spaces being created between one architectural package and another.

Although very different in character, the facades have common themes that harmonise them, eg: double height glazed stairwells and portal front entrances for the many front doors, each facade works hard to enliven the street scape.

As a counterpoint to the solidity of masonry walls which wrap the scheme, a filigree layer of balconies is used, both to give a strong indoor-outdoor animation to the facades, and to enrich the facades with a delicate layer of metalwork which will create dramatically changing patterns of shadow and light as the sun moves through the day.

The balconies across the scheme have some unifying characteristics, such as the strong horizontal datum set up by the primary steel frame, but there are also many differences, from space to space and from building to building.