Cairo Place sits slightly apart from the other local regeneration initiatives in Croydon, in a more sensitive, lower-rise part of the old town in the vicinity of several listed buildings.

Through a series of workshops with Croydon Council’s visionary placemaking team, and collaborating with S. Williams Architects, we gave the existing, corporate-sized scheme of 115 residential units – in a four-storey podium topped with a set-back, fourteen-storey tower – our own bespoke, small practice attention. We set out the social housing units to generous space standards and gave them their own front doors, before refining and simplifying the patchwork of material finishes to give both tower and podium a robustly elegant edge. The scheme was granted planning permission in December 2015 and completed in 2020.