Bridge City Estate

Location
Community 14, Tema, Greater Accra, Ghana
Client
Bridge City Properties
Disciplines
Architecture, Landscape
Role
Architect and landscape architect
Site area
4,645 m²
Status
Design complete, partly built
The internal street, looking between two rows of houses, with palms and clipped shrubs in raised beds along both frontages and railings set on low white walls.
The internal street

THE SITE

Community 14, Tema. A block of 4,645 square metres with three buildings already standing on it, and a developer who wanted the rest of it planned.

We were brought in for the layout before any house was drawn, which on an estate is the order that decides everything after it. The line of the street and the depth of the plots are settled at that stage and stop being negotiable after it: a house plan can be redrawn in a week, a road cannot. The three existing buildings were part of the starting geometry rather than something to design around later.

The building plans came next, and they cover about three quarters of the estate. The estate is Bridge City’s throughout; the remaining plots were sold to buyers who wanted to run their own build. So the layout had to work for houses we would not be drawing, which is a test a single plot never sets.

One house from the street: a timber-clad upper box over a glazed living floor, a balcony to the right, and a sliding gate in railings set on a white plinth. A roof terrace on the corner plot: a parasol over a timber table and chairs, climbing plants trained over the parapet and up the return wall.
The corner house · The hidden terrace

THE SCHEME

Fifteen houses on 4,645 square metres, all of them two storeys, ground and first. That is about 310 square metres a house with the road and the gutters still in the figure, and it is the number that decides most of what follows.

One road serves the block. It comes in off the public road at a corner, runs the length of the site and turns once, and thirteen of the fifteen are entered from it. The other two sit on the public road frontage and take their gates straight off it: a plot already fronting a public road has no reason to be driven through an estate to reach. A loop would have taken a second carriageway out of the plots and saved nobody any walking.

Every plot is entered through a gate into its own paved forecourt with the parking inside it, so nothing parks on the street. That is what lets the carriageway stay as narrow as it is — it only has to carry cars that are moving.

Along both frontages runs one continuous strip carrying the drainage gutter and the street planting together, palms at intervals with low shrubs between them. It is the only element that runs the full length of the street without a break, and it does more than the houses do to make the street read as one place rather than a row of separate gates.

The estate from across the public road: the whole street frontage, the gated entrance on axis in the middle with the internal street running away behind it, houses either side above a white boundary wall, and a grass verge in the foreground.
The frontage from the public road
The estate from directly above: houses either side of an internal street, planted strips between the plots, parking bays along the frontages and a public road along the bottom edge.
Bird’s-eye view
The estate from the open ground along its left side, over a white boundary wall, with climbers over the roof parapet and parasols on the nearest house and the rest of the development stepping away to the right.
Left side view

WHAT TO NOTICE

The corner house was never sold. Bridge City kept their prime plot, which makes it the one frontage on this street that belonged to Bridge City Properties from the boundary wall inwards — everywhere else the wall and the gate belong to whoever bought the plot. It works as the sample. What the rest of the street was drawn to be is standing on the corner, which is where most people will see it from.

WHERE THIS STOPS BEING TRUE

In these images every frontage agrees with the one next to it. Some of that is contracted and some of it is not. Setbacks were agreed before any plot was sold, so the building line holds the length of the street whoever builds on it. Wall heights and gates were left to the buyers, and a wall and a gate are most of what you see of a house from the road. Houses are going up on those plots now, so this is being settled rather than predicted.

Drainage was fixed up front as well. The gutters run the full length of the road on both sides, across every frontage, and every plot takes them. That one is not a matter of taste: on ground this flat the line only works if it is continuous, so an owner who bridges it badly or fills a stretch of it is not affecting their own plot alone but every one downstream of it. The street is held where it has to be held — where the water goes and where the buildings stand — and left open where it shows most.