St. Luke Apartment from the road: four floors in white render, three of flats over a ground floor of open parking, a timber-clad bay running up the near corner and a boundary wall along the pavement.

St. Luke Apartment

Community 18, Tema · 2023

165 square metres at Community 18, Tema, taken off the front of a larger plot the same client owns. It is the strip that meets the road, and that is the case for putting flats on it.

The frontage carries the most access and the least privacy of anything on the holding, which makes it the wrong ground for the house behind and the right ground for a building that wants a street address. Standing there, the block also screens the private properties behind it, which was the second reason for building at all.

Six flats on a plot this size means going up rather than out. The ground floor carries no flats: free-standing columns and parking, open to the air, with a security room closed off at the back. With the stair and the lobby in the middle of the plan, each floor above has room for two flats, one with one bedroom and one with two, and the same plan repeats three times.

That mix decides who the building is for. It lets the same block house an individual, a small family and, at a push, a medium-sized one. Six identical units would have been quicker to draw, and would have tied the whole building to a single kind of household.

Location
Community 18, Tema, Ghana
Client
Bridge City Properties
Disciplines
Architecture, Interiors
Role
Lead designer, architecture and interiors
Site area
165 m²
Status
Design complete, unbuilt
The block square on from the road: four floors in white render, three of flats with a timber-clad bay up the left of the front and stacked balconies at the centre, over a ground floor where two cars are parked between the columns, with street lamps and boundary walls either side.
Square on.
The block from the road at an angle, the flank running away with windows stacked over the three floors of flats, the security room glazed and lit at the back of the ground floor behind its planting bed, and a slatted gate set in the white boundary wall, with palms and flowering shrubs in beds along the drive.
From the road.

What to notice

Every bathroom and kitchen sits directly above the one below. The plan does not change from floor to floor, so the wet rooms line up through all three floors of flats and the waste drops straight down instead of running sideways under a slab to find a stack.

The living area: a pale grey corner sofa and a timber coffee table facing a wall-hung television on a white wall above a long timber unit, a curtained window to the left, and the kitchen open through to the right.
The living area, open through to the kitchen.
The kitchen and dining area, with a peninsula and stools between the run of units and the dining table at the window.
The kitchen and dining area, peninsula between the units and the table.
A bedroom: a double bed with a wide upholstered headboard between two bedside tables, curtains across the windows either side of it, a split air conditioner on the wall above, and a sliding door at the right onto a balcony with a chair.
A bedroom, the balcony door at the right and the split unit over the bed.

Where this stops being true

The parking under the block is the only parking this building has, and it has to stay open. On a plot this size it is also the obvious place to find another room, so the risk is a real one: enclose it in a later change of plan and six flats are left with nowhere to put a car. This is written up in full in the note The ground floor that has to stay empty.