From Ikea storage to the benefits of a solidly built table, architects from Paris to Tokyo share their tips and philosophy for living beautifully in smaller spaces

Australia has some of the largest homes in the world . Many who do live small aspire to one day live big. But around the world, limited space is not always seen as a sacrifice.

From Sweden, where the average size of an apartment is 68 sq metres , to Hong Kong’s micro flats as small as 18 sq metres, globally architects are used to getting creative with tight spaces – they must let as much light in and offer individuals and families the same flexibility as a larger home.

Continue reading...

Victory for campaigners and conservators as elaborately decorated property is honoured with protected status

A ground-floor rented flat in Birkenhead which was crafted over a period of 30 years into an extraordinary palace of outsider art has been given Grade II-listed status.

The flat in Wirral, known as Ron’s Place , is thought to be the UK’s only example of outsider art to be nationally listed.

Continue reading...

The mythic Stone of Destiny, used in Scottish and British coronations for centuries, is the star attraction of the £27m redeveloped Perth Museum – now brighter, easier to access and as eclectic as ever

It’s hard to think of a piece of masonry more charged with history, myth and emotion, per cubic inch, than the Stone of Destiny. This battered suitcase-sized object, on which Scottish and English kings have been inaugurated and crowned for centuries, has been abducted and re-abducted, bombed, broken and repaired. In 1996 it was taken to Edinburgh Castle from Westminster Abbey on the raised back of a Land Rover, surrounded by a glass screen and a guard of honour like a victorious president. Last year it was temporarily taken back to London, so that King Charles III could be crowned with it beneath him.

Now the stone sits in the former auditorium of Perth City Hall, a venue that formerly thrilled to the sounds of the Who, Morrissey and, just after she was first elected prime minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher. It has been a long time coming home – it was last seen in this city (or, to be precise, at the nearby Scone Abbey) more than 700 years ago, before King Edward I of England seized it. Now it is the literal and metaphorical centrepiece of the newly opened £27m Perth Museum , which has been redeveloped and installed in the old hall with the help of the Dutch architectural practice Mecanoo and the exhibition designers Metaphor .

Continue reading...

Eccentric Victorian owner of Waterton Park, near Wakefield, made pioneering decisions to protect wildlife

A Yorkshire parkland regarded as the world’s first nature reserve – which was created by an eccentric pioneering 19th-century environmentalist – has been given a Grade II listing.

Historic England said Waterton Park, near Wakefield , was the earliest known example of a landscape designed specifically to attract and protect native wildlife.

Continue reading...

New date for Antoni Gaudí’s basilica announced but enormous, controversial stairway will take another eight years

Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia basilica has a new completion date of 2026, which will come 144 years after the first stone was laid.

The president of the organisation tasked with completing Antoni Gaudí’s masterwork announced the date last Wednesday, which coincides with the centenary of the death of the building’s architect.

Continue reading...

From facial tattoos to TV stations, young Māori are enthusiastically embracing tribal cultural identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. Now a new wave of Indigenous architects are making their mark

A bright red ribbon of metal buckles out of the ground in suburban Auckland, ramping up at a sharp angle before cranking over in a lopsided arc. It frames a big glass wall, folded in a diagonal crease, whose striped surface is covered in a riot of patterns, with abstract motifs of waves, fish and stars swirling together in a polychromatic frenzy.

This is Taumata o Kupe, a new Māori meeting house and education centre for the Mahurehure community, and one of the brightest beacons of Aotearoa New Zealand’s burgeoning contemporary Māori architecture scene.

“It’s quite hard to miss,” says Wayne Wharepapa Asher, an elder member of the community. He recently moved into an apartment in a new terrace next to the building, where the homes open on to a pedestrian mews and a shared deck faces a lush babbling brook. “It feels like a different world here now. It has given us a fabulous place to share our culture with visitors from all walks of life.”

Continue reading...

Battersea, London
An old barber shop redesigned by architects Brisco Loran as their own live-work space is the latest project from developer Duncan Blackmore, a man on a mission to repurpose quirky urban spaces in a positive way

Everyone knows that high streets are under threat, caught in spirals of decline driven by the rise of online shopping. It’s also obvious, or should be, that the government’s big idea for responding to this crisis, which is to make it possible to convert shops into homes without planning permission, mostly makes things worse. Welcoming shop fronts get replaced by crude brick walls with sash windows punched into them. Dead space is created on the frontage; footfall slackens. The high values of residential property give owners a strong incentive to close shops and make them into cheap flats – cheap to build, that is, not to buy or rent.

Costa’s Barbers , a project in Battersea, south London, shows how such changes may be done differently. It’s a shop-to-home conversion, except that its design does everything it can to animate the street where it stands, and to leave open the possibility that future uses will involve transactions between inside and out. It’s a work of craft and delight that at the very least brightens its surroundings. It is not, it should also be said, anything to do with cutting hair, but only carries the name of a business long gone from the premises.

Continue reading...

The government deems a solar array’s ‘visual harm’ outweighs its economic benefits, with the Mitsubishi tower it’s the reverse

Last week the government decided to refuse planning permission for a solar farm in Northamptonshire .

This is the same government that last month, possibly encouraged by a letter from the developers Mitsubishi to Rishi Sunak, approved 72 Upper Ground , a prominent, lumpen office block on the South Bank in London.

Continue reading...

A dream team of architects has planning permission to convert a former ironworks in the old Sussex market town into a sustainable new community for all, with low-rise flats, courtyard gardens, electric car share and more. If built, it could spearhead a transformation of British housing

Imagine a new district of an old town, made up of multiple good things. Its blocks of flats, mostly four or five storeys high, would achieve what’s called “gentle density”, which means getting a good number of homes on to a piece of land without it feeling overcrowded. Their shared courtyard gardens, based on Danish and Swedish models, would help foster community life. It would be a place for all generations, different tenures and levels and affordability, of creative work and leisure as well as its energy-efficient homes. It would be designed by skilful and scrupulous architects and engineers, using materials such as cross-laminated timber and hemp to minimise its environmental impact.

Such, and more, is the promise of the Phoenix , a development of 685 homes, 30% of them affordable, proposed for the flat site of the former Phoenix ironworks on the edge of Lewes, the picturesque and steep-streeted county town of East Sussex. It looks, in a land where new homes are largely the lumpen products of volume housebuilders, miraculous, yet it won planning permission last month, and construction of the first phase is due to start early next year, with completion of the whole scheme scheduled for 2030.

Continue reading...