Last month they chose their house types and plot locations. This month K1 Cohousing members have been busy selecting an important factor in the external appearance of their homes: the bricks.

Custom build homes at K1 will  built from Trivselhus’s high-performance closed timber panel system. They will, however, be clad with a traditional brick skin, making them look like traditional Cambridge terraced streets.

This brick cladding gave a great opportunity to allow purchasers to exercise some freedom over the external appearance of their new homes. So with Mole Architects, TOWN put together a palette of four brick types for Cambridge Cohousing members to select from.

We chose four basic brick types, each with some relevance in the Cambridge context:

• White painted
• Buff
• Red
• Dark grey-brown

The effect we hoped for was to emulate in contemporary form the balance of variety and coherence that can be observed all over Cambridge. Variety, in that over the years people have built houses at different times, or at some point have decided to paint their house instead. And coherence, in that in spite of these differences, Cambridge streets are generally unified by their scale, proportion and basic materials.

One thing we wanted to avoid was any attempt to orchestrate the whole piece to achieve some effect or other. Old streets are great because they are the result of the choices of countless individuals over many decades. This sense of spontaneous, individual choice was what we hoped to achieve.

Cambridge Cohousing entered fully into the spirit of this and made their choices based simply on their own preference. The results are exactly what we hoped for in this custom build development – a good mix of brick types and a real sense of authenticity.

We haven’t yet specified the exact bricks that will be used to build K1 Cambridge Cohousing. This will be done when a contractor is appointed and will depend on availability at the time. As would be expected from a Mole-designed custom build scheme, the bricks, as with all other materials, will be carefully selected. For anyone who is interested, we’ll be revisit bricks on the blog in more detail when we come to selecting them.