St. Luke Apartment

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 apartment block seen from the road, four storeys in white render with a timber-clad bay running up the near corner and a boundary wall along the pavement.
The block from the road

THE SITE

165 square metres in Community 18, Tema, taken off the front of a larger plot the same client owns. It is the strip that meets the road.

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 where it does, it also screens the private properties behind it, and that was the second reason for building here at all.

Typical floor plan: a one-bedroom flat and a two-bedroom flat either side of the stair and lobby, with grid references, room names, dimensions and floor areas as drawn.
Typical floor — one one-bedroom and one two-bedroom flat

THE BUILDING

Six flats on a plot this size means going up rather than out. The ground floor carries no accommodation at all: columns and parking, open to the air. The three floors above it each hold one one-bedroom flat and one two-bedroom flat, the same plan repeated three times.

The design decision with respect to the space available leaves little discretion about how many flats sit on a floor, and with the stair and the lobby taken out of the middle, two is what the footprint carries.

It also decides who the building is for. One one-bedroom flat and one two-bedroom flat on every floor lets the same block house an individual, a small family, and/or 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.

The kitchen and dining area, with a peninsula and stools between the run of units and the dining table at the window. A bedroom with the balcony door open at the far wall and a television on a wall-hung unit opposite the bed.
Kitchen and dining · Bedroom with balcony

WHAT TO NOTICE

Since the project is tightly space bound, 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 storeys and the waste drops straight down instead of running sideways under a slab to find a stack.

WHERE THIS STOPS BEING TRUE

The open ground floor 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.