Spa ambience with the option to grow your own dinner: Britain’s best new building is a revamped care home | Stirling Prize

DAppleby Blue Almshouse, a social housing complex for older people, has been described as “providing pure joy”, and is the winner of this year’s RIBA Stirling Award. With an ambiance that has more in common with an Alpine spa hotel than the noisy rooms and gloomy corridors typically associated with seniors’ housing, the building – designed by architects Weatherford Watson Mann – reinvents a nursing home for the modern age as a place of care, shelter and socialization.

As a type of structure, the origins of almshouses go back centuries, giving a semblance of dignity to the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the marginalized. Isolated from the outside world, with secluded dwellings arrayed around courtyards, they evoke a feeling of pastoral goodness.

For Weatherford Watson Mann, the challenge was not only how to rethink what a traditional hospice looked like, but also how to look beyond simply providing housing, to envision it as the heart of a hosting network, a collection of rooms to be shared with like-minded local organisations. The client, United St Saviour’s, a charity based in Southwark, London, is also a grant-making organisation, supporting refugee groups and youth centres, as well as cultural organisations. The aim is for these spaces to take advantage of the building’s public spaces, feeling like an integral part of local life, rather than an isolated retirement area.

The Appleby Blue Hotel is located in Bermondsey, in south-east London, between Victorian terraces and post-war buildings, on a site formerly occupied by a disused care home. Target clients are those over 65 who meet the charity’s definition of being in financial need and who have lived in their local Southwark borough for more than three years. The 57 bright and spacious apartments for singles and couples are arranged around a central courtyard filled with sparkling ginkgo trees and tinkling pools.

Appleby is a solid five-storey block of mottled brown and blue brick with pale oak window frames that contrast sharply with the dark masonry. To the rear, taking into account the scale of the Victorian terraces, it steps down to a smaller two-storey volume topped with a roof garden filled with raised beds and seating nooks. It is dedicated to growing produce for use in the home’s kitchen, and is maintained by a local gardening group, to which residents also make horticultural contributions.

At the heart of the building overlooking the ginkgo tree courtyard is a double-height garden room, designed to host a range of activities. Beyond the daily routine of eating, drinking, gossiping and watching the world go by, this might include coffee mornings, movie nights, dance classes, markets, musical performances, plays and workshop work.

The human stage of this “civic room” can be seen from the street through a wooden and glass corridor that runs along the main facade, like a huge shop window. “The idea was to build in the heart of the community, in a busy place, with a very direct relationship to the main street, not to hide people away,” says project architect Stephen Weatherford.

The main step was to get rid of the claustrophobic and confusing interior corridors. Instead, individual apartments are accessed through glass galleries that wrap around the south side of the main building. Furnished with sturdy oak seating, tiled floors and planter boxes, the galleries act as informal indoor and outdoor spaces to sit and contemplate with neighbours, while enjoying views of the Victorian terrace gardens and the rolling hills of London suburbs beyond. In warm weather, the galleries can be opened through large sliding screens.

In its architecture and operation, Appleby Blue represents an open, conscious presence and response to the prevailing idea that older people (particularly poorer older people) should be relegated to the urban, social and cultural margins, with serious consequences for their mental and physical health. By reimagining afterlife as a collective experience, it brings its residents together in a building that elevates everyday life.

On behalf of the Stirling Prize judging panel, Ingrid Schroeder, Director of the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture, said: “Designing social housing for later life is often reduced to simply providing a service. However, Appleby Blue is about providing pure joy. Its architects have designed high-quality spaces that are generous and thoughtful, blending function and community to create Environments that truly care about their residents.”

For all its admirable intentions, Appleby Blue is still just a drop in a vast ocean of needs. But by suggesting different ways of doing things, it forms a model that has the potential to be replicated. Although it’s not all “rainbows and unicorns,” as Weatherford admits, residents clearly enjoy their surroundings and enjoy being part of the poorhouse community.

Facing competition from larger, more “distinctive” projects – including the restoration of the Elizabeth Tower in the Palace of Westminster – this is the second Stirling Prize for the Weatherford Watson man. In 2013, the practice won for its imaginative redesign of the ruined Apsley Castle in Warwickshire for the Landmark Trust. Restoring a stately home destroyed by fire and designing social housing for older people may seem two worlds apart, but both are underscored by a thoughtful sensitivity to context and the drive to transform and transcend.