One Swallow Street - Associated Architects

Project Value:

£3.2 million

Client:

Completion:

2016

Key Points

26,500 sq.ft of former office space

55 one-bedroom apartments

At the very heart of Birmingham’s transformation

Birmingham has a well documented shortage of city centre residential stock. Our scheme at One Swallow Street has converted 26,500sq.ft of former office accommodation into 55 one-bedroom prime city apartments. The site sits 200 metres away from the recently renovated New Street Station and a newly completed Metro stop, placing it in the very heart of Birmingham’s transformation. As well as fantastic transport links, the building is surrounded by the city’s best hospitality and leisure offerings. The owners of the building, SHP Opportunity Fund, wanted to transform One Swallow Street from a dated and unlettable 1980’s office to a key development in the new wave of city centre living spaces.

Birmingham’s first institutionally funded PRS development

In 2015 we secured Prior Approval for changing the use of the building from commercial office space to residential. The £3.2m project is Birmingham’s first fully institutionally funded private rented sector development.

The Ground floor has been reconfigured to create a spacious foyer, as well as cycle and refuse storage areas. Throughout the design process we gave careful consideration to the co-ordination of services, ensuring that we’ve maximised living space. All the windows of One Swallow Street have been replaced as part of the redevelopment, creating an attractive new facade to the building. Our wealth of experience in the commercial office sector has positioned us to creatively work around the site’s existing constraints. The design implemented a bespoke fire engineered solution to meet Building Regulations compliance

Collaborative Method

We made sure that from the early stages of design we worked closely with the letting agents to identify the requirements of likely occupants and crafted the specifications around them. A testament to this collaborative method and the quality of the finished scheme is that it took only two weeks to fully let the development. One Swallow Street is a new chapter for Birmingham’s city centre residential offering, one in which we have proved that working hand-in-hand with agency experts can result in a scheme that delivers exactly what people want from a city apartment.