Brackenford Makers Trust · 2023
Brackenford Dairy: 18 maker studios in a 1930s dairy
A locally listed 1930s dairy converted into 18 affordable studios for makers, with a shared kiln room and a café, keeping 86 percent of the original structure.
- Client
- Brackenford Makers Trust
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Lead architect and heritage consultant
- Duration
- 3 years
- Services
- Feasibility study
- Planning and heritage
- Full design service
The problem
The Brackenford dairy closed in 2011 and sat empty for nine years. It is a concrete-frame building with brick infill panels, steel Crittall windows and a tall bottling hall, 1,150 m² over two floors. A developer had planning consent to demolish it for flats. The Makers Trust bought it instead, with $3.1 million from a community share offer and a regional regeneration grant.
The brief was 18 studios at below-market rents, from 25 to 70 m², plus a shared kiln and woodwork room that would not disturb anyone. The frame had carbonation and spalling in places, the roof leaked, and the floor slabs carried an unknown load. The building is locally listed, so the bottling hall and the street facade had to read as they always had.
Process
- I
Survey before sketching
We spent the first eight weeks measuring, with a structural engineer testing cores from twelve columns. The frame was sound apart from the roof beams, and the slabs could take 5 kN/m², enough for kilns and benches. That result decided the project: keep the frame, repair the concrete and design around what was there.
- II
Rooms inside the hall
Rather than subdivide the bottling hall with full-height walls, we placed timber studio boxes inside it, two storeys high with their own roofs. The hall stays legible as one volume, and each studio gets acoustic separation. The original Crittall windows were refurbished and secondary-glazed rather than replaced, keeping the street facade intact.
- III
Phased so tenants could move in early
The trust needed rent coming in before the building was finished. We split the work into two phases: the ground floor and kiln room first, then the upper hall. Eight tenants moved in after fourteen months, and their rents covered the loan interest during phase two.
Selected images
Every other architect started with a demolition option. Atelier Fenwick started with a core drill and an engineer, and that saved the building and about a year of arguments.
Outcome
All 18 studios were let before phase two finished, with a waiting list of 40. Keeping 86 percent of the structure saved an estimated 610 tonnes of embodied carbon compared with the demolition scheme. Total construction cost came to $2,700 per m², well below a new build of the same size.
- 1,150m²
- Gross internal area
- 86%
- Original structure kept
- $2,700
- Construction cost per m²
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