Community Housing Self Build
Working with a London based community group, wanting to build a strawbale housing development and community centre.
Cave has worked with a London based community group through a series of workshops to help focus their project vision, set up project aims, short and long term goals, as well as to help them produce a booklet for funding purposes. The booklet showcase’s their project to potential investors in a clear and visually stimulating way.
Mixed use development
The development is to comprise of mixed uses; residential, education, leisure, retail and community. It would offer different sized residential units to cater for all family configurations. It would house a small home education classroom, a hall for community activities as well as to generate a rental income, as a venue for hire. To generate income there is a small community cafe on site. The cafe would offer affordable, healthy, locally grown food to the residents and local community. The aim would be to use produce grown on the community allotments and in the gardens. The cafe would also offer vocational training to residents and members of the local community.
Community gardens
The grounds of this community housing project would be cultivated and maintained by the residents. There would be allotments, ornamental food and medicine gardens. As well as open recreational areas. You can see another example of a community garden project created and maintained by residents, designed by Cave on our harmony gardens page. This is a beautiful award winning garden on the Broadwater farm estate in Haringey.
Straw bale building
This building will be built using strawbales, a healthy, natural waste product, that is a wonderful building material. just like big bricks! Strawbales are warm, fire retardent, breathable and great fun to build with. The residents of this housing project would build the buildings themselves with the help of professional builders. The building would be energy efficient, healthy, cheap to run and of a simple construction. Because of this the build would also provide vocational training for residents in building skills.
