Home & Work in Suburbia

Twelve homes and a workshop

The site is a forgotten car park in Tolworth, wedged between a small industrial estate to the west and a nature reserve to the east. The proposal pairs twelve homes with a timber joinery workshop — programmes that don’t usually share a postcode, but which here feed each other. Residents have a working maker on their doorstep; the workshop has steady local clientele.

The dwellings are timber-framed, with a generous shared roof structure visible from the interior — the same joinery vocabulary as the workshop next door. Light enters through tall openings onto a planted terrace.

Adjustable green thresholds

The most pointed move is at the boundaries between dwellings. Where most housing schemes draw a hard line — a brick party wall, a fence — this one plants a hedge. Each home has an adjustable green threshold of hedges, shrubs and small trees that residents can prune and tune toward privacy or shared ground.

The boundary becomes negotiable — privacy a year-by-year decision rather than a building line set in concrete. Over time, the development can grow into a more communal or more private place, on the residents’ terms.