REFURBISHMENT AND CONVERSION
From ruined barns to residential facility
The IAD Company, an award-winning Cardiff-based not-for-profit design consultancy, recently successfully redeveloped a number of ruined agricultural barns on the Welsh coast into a set of ‘forever homes’ for adults living with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). As architectural and interior design consultant, IAD was briefed to create a mixture of self-contained and shared houses for 12 residents and associated staff. Rebecca Lewis-Chapman, director at The IAD Company, discusses the thinking behind both the location and the finished design. The scheme won the Project of the Year Refurbishment Award at last May’s 2019 DiMH Awards.
The 800 year-old barns have been skilfully transformed into homes for adults living with Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
Once every few years a project comes along that stands out from all the others. Such projects are not necessarily the biggest, the most expensive, or the most ground-breaking – but they are always the most fulfilling. By this I don’t mean fulfilling in the ‘warm, fuzzy feeling’, sense of the word; I’m talking about the kind of fulfilment you get after a particularly difficult training session, or from getting the mark you grafted for in a harder-than- expected test. I suppose another word for this type of fulfilment is pride, and the Ty Carreg project is something that The IAD Company will remain proud of for a very long time.
The West Aberthaw Barns were a collection of stone ruins located a few hundred metres away from the Aberthaw Power Station near Barry in the Vale of Glamorgan. The site consisted of several buildings, the oldest of which dates back over 800 years, in varying states of disrepair. From working with structures with most of the walls still intact, but lacking roofs or windows, through to buildings that could only be identified by the footprint of their foundations, the requirements to bring each one back to life were varied, to say the least.
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The original developer purchased the site with a view to building four luxury homes, taking advantage of the secluded location, rural surroundings, and clear sea views. As stunning as the new properties would have been, however, this was not what destiny had in store for our barns.
A site with unique potential Part way through construction, the site was noticed by Orbis Education and Care. All the factors that had made this site so well suited to a luxury housing development had the potential to afford even greater benefits to a residential care home. The isolation, the green setting, and the calming influence of the sea, all fed into the site’s unique potential. As those of you who work in the healthcare sector will know, there are very strict rules which regulate the industry, including around accommodation, while of course there are also very strict rules when working on 800-year-old Grade II-listed buildings. As Orbis’ appointed architectural and interior design consultants for this project, our job was to find the space in between all of the regulations, and create something extraordinary within it. Our first task was to make sure that the practical requirements of the barns could
be met. Our brief was to create a mixture of self-contained apartments and shared houses with space to provide homes for 12 adults with additional needs relating to the autistic spectrum. As well as ensuring that all the rooms were large enough and complied with the relevant regulatory standards, we also had to ensure that each room had access to suitably sized windows, both as sources of natural light, and to meet fire regulations. Unlike most of our projects, we had almost no flexibility to extend any of the barns, or to alter, enlarge, or add any windows or openings, due to the listed status. This meant we had to get seriously creative with our internal layouts.
Pieces begin to fall into place After working through all the options, the pieces began to fall in to place, and we put together a floorplan that achieved everything needed. Armed with a working layout, we went back to planning with a Change of Use application, to have the site recategorised from a C3 use class (individual homes inhabited by a family or a small group of unrelated people), to a C2 (residential institutions such as boarding schools, care homes, nursing homes, and hospitals).
JANUARY 2020 | THE NETWORK
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