Phoenix Works,
Manchester

Wellbeing, Community and Home Working

Phoenix Works, on the edge of the Castlefield Conservation Area, has been designed to promote wellbeing, enhance a sense of community and facilitate home working.

It is composed of 237 cross-ventilated, dual-aspect apartments, townhouses and penthouses, with open balcony access that includes garden kitchen planting. Phoenix Works includes extensive naturalistic landscaping to enhance wellbeing, generous amenity space and dwelling arrangements that accommodate home working and foster neighbourly interactions to deliver a sense of community within the development.

Phoenix Works' placemaking features include a new public square that completes the masterplan for the wider area which is supported with ground floor commercial uses to activate and enliven the public realm. The materiality and highly articulated bronze and pre-cast concrete facade is responsive to historic industrial uses of the site and locality.

Proposals include dual-aspect apartments, open balcony walkways, extensive naturalistic planting and growing spaces to enhance wellbeing. Entrance threshold spaces are provided to create strong relationships between apartments and communal areas to encourage neighbourliness and social interactions.

In addition, carefully designed home working bays with dedicated workspaces, good views, natural daylight and the ability to separate work and home life.

In 2022, the Manchester Society of Architects awarded Phoenix Works their project of the year, with their commentary including:

“... Particularly impressive are the collective spaces and amenities. The attention to their design results in a high-quality domestic environment that enhances a sense of community. Additionally, the quality materialisation of the interior and the façade with the bay windows exude exceptional dignity and appeal.”

Enhancing a sense of Wellbeing

Instilling a sense of Community

Facilitate Home Working

Courtyard Block

Demolish the existing building to enable redevelopment that restores the historic street pattern. Create a consistent grid for the rational planning of the building, delivering dual-aspect dwellings around a central courtyard with positive, external-facing street frontages.

New Public Square

Remove a portion of the building footprint to enable the delivery of a new public square for the benefit of the site and the wider masterplan area.

Landscaped Courtyard and Active Street Frontages

Link the new public square with a raised central courtyard space as part of a high-quality landscaped external amenity offer. Raising the courtyard allows for building service areas and parking to be hidden below and for street frontage to be prioritised for active frontage to enliven the new public square and adjacent streets.

Contextually Responsive Massing

Provide residential dwellings as part of a contextually-responsive massing with a step in height to mediate between buildings of different heights in the immediate context.

External Walkways

External walkways connect the dwellings to a central core, creating a pleasant courtyard setting that encourages neighbourly interactions and in-turn fostering a sense of community. Individual kitchen gardens and views of the landscaped courtyard from the walkways promote residents' well-being.

Dual Aspect Dwellings

All dwellings are dual aspect, providing benefits to residents that includes the possibility of natural ventilation within homes. A limited number of well-designed dwelling types also drives quality, value and efficiency through repetition.

Duplex Dwellings

The upper most storeys of the building accommodate dual aspect, duplex dwellings, adding positively to the mix of dwelling types as well as contributing to a building massing that references its local context.

Work from Home Façade Module

Dwellings include an innovative facade module that provides a place to work-from-home, accommodate planting, and improve natural lighting levels and external aspect to maximise liveability for residents. Through the aspect that they offer, the modules also provide excellent natural surveillance to surrounding streets.

A Range of External Amenity

A range of external amenities are available to residents, including ground-level private gardens providing defensible space to the street. Kitchen gardens, an integrated bench and a stable door to the entrance of dwellings encourage interactions between residents, which are further encouraged with shared roof terraces. In addition, upper duplex dwellings benefit from private roof terraces.