Mikhail Riches

"Not only is the scheme a delight by anyone's standards, it also offers a roadmap for precisely the type of housing the UK needs huge amounts of," – Piers Taylor We’re honoured that our project Goldsmith Street for Norwich City Council has been announced as Dezeen's ‘Most Significant Building of 2019'. This comes part of their 21st-Century Architecture series looking at the most influential buildings of the last 25 years. Thank you to Dezeen for the inclusion within an impressive line up. Illustration by jackbedford.co.uk

Hugely excited to see such a stellar line up for the Shropshire Society of Architects' Spring Lecture series. The lecture series has a fantastic legacy, regularly attracting some of the industry's most celebrated and innovative thinkers and practitioners - and this year is no exception. A lecture entitled 'Making Homes' by Amy Waite from Mikhail Riches will kick off the series on February 12th, a practice that won the Stirling Prize in 2019 for its Goldsmith Street social housing project and was shortlisted again in 2024 for its regeneration of Sheffield's Park Hill. Doors open at the Hive in Shrewsbury at 6.30pm with the lecture starting at 7pm. Entry is £5 and free for students. Definitely not one to be missed! EH Smith Architectural Solutions #lecture #shropshire #architecture #housing

We're delighted to announce details of our RIBA West Midlands #Shropshire Society of Architects 2025 Spring Lecture series, which is kindly sponsored by EH Smith Architectural Solutions Our first event is on 12th February and features Amy Waite from Mikhail Riches with a lecture entitled ‘Making Homes’ Annalie Riches and David Mikhail founded Mikhail Riches in 2014, with a focus on improving the quality of UK housing. They are leaders in environmental and socially inclusive design across multiple sectors – including Housing, Education, Mixed-Use, Masterplanning, Leisure and Retrofit. Associate Director, Amy Waite, will talk about notable projects including the refurbishment of the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield as well as Goldsmith Street in Norwich, which was awarded the 2019 RIBA Stirling Prize and the Neave Brown Award for Housing. Our second event on 26th March features Meredith Bowles from Mole Architects, who will deliver a talk entitled ‘Housing and Co-Design’. Mole Architects was established by Meredith in 1997 and has gained a strong reputation for its particular brand of sustainable modern contextual design, specialising in houses and house design, and has won many national awards for excellence for both private and affordable house design, including winning the RIBA Manser Medal for the best house in the UK, the Daily Telegraph award for best house, the Ideal Home Show Blue Ribbon Award, and the Housing Excellence Award for best affordable development. Meredith will talk about recent and ongoing projects and how co-design produces places that feel good to live in. Our final event on 23rd April features Marcus Lee from LEEP Architects and Dr Corinna Dean, a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, who will deliver a talk entitled ‘Agri-Tecture - A Transformative Project'. Marcus Lee formed LEEP – Lee Partnership - in 2014. The practice has built up a portfolio of private homes on challenging sites bringing extraordinary schemes to light. Marcus is highly regarded within the industry for his master-planning, aviation, innovative houses and a diverse range of award-winning projects. He previously commanded a key leadership role at the Richard Rogers Partnership and also established the award-winning practice, FLAQ. Dr Corinna Dean is a senior lecturer, critical urbanist and artist. Her current work looks at the intersection between ecologies, landscape and buildings. The lecture will be given context through Corinna's research interests, but also through Marcus's own work, including houses that preceded their new direction involving the adaptive re-use of 'unloved rural buildings'. The principal case study will be their current work on The Drift, Abbots Hall Farm Buildings. The lectures will be held at The Hive Shrewsbury, 5 Belmont, Shrewsbury, SY1 1TE. Doors will open 6.30pm for a 7.00pm start. Admission is £5 / Free to Students. Please contact sue.jones@bchnarchitects.co.uk for further details.

Thank you to Eleanor Young, editor of the RIBA Journal, for our invitation to the RIBA roundtable discussion, 'How to find more homes without building anew'. We chatted with Arup, StudioSaar, Studio Partington, The University of Sheffield, Karakusevic Carson Architects and The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) to explore sustainable opportunities to use existing housing stock better and incentivise downsizing. Our Associate Director, Amy Waite, commented: ‘The things that make projects successful are the things that foster community, because in retrofit projects you're not dealing with an empty site or empty building. You've got people, lives and histories.’

Thank you to the Faculty of Architecture at Dresden University of Technology, GDE architecture, for the invitation to speak about our work on Park Hill. Our Associate Director Amy Waite delivered a lecture titled 'The Rebirth of Park Hill' which retraced the history of the structure and the delivery of the Phase 2 development with Urban Splash

Last month we had the pleasure of celebrating 10 years of TOWN. and their track record on purpose-led and high quality sustainable developments. We are proud to have worked with TOWN and Mole Architects on Love Wolverton – a mixed-use urban regeneration of Wolvertown town centre in collaboration with Milton Keynes City Council and Willmott Dixon. The regeneration project will move into full construction in 2025, with completion anticipated in 2027. Once finished, the scheme will deliver 115 homes, eight shops and the Still Green cohousing community. We look forward to seeing what TOWN accomplish over next 10 years and you can read more about their journey at https://lnkd.in/eVB4bxHm

In November, we attended the unveiling of London Legacy Development Corporation's new handbook, 'Creating Places that work for Women and Girls'. LLDC has been practicing gender-informed urban design and planning since 2021. The knowledge and good practice have been compiled into a handbook providing practical steps that urban planners, developers, architects, and other stakeholders can take to ensure a gender-informed approach is applied in the planning, design and decision-making process, from the inception of any project through to delivery and long-term management. We will be exercising our consolidated knowledge of gender-informed urban design and planning over a large number of up-and-coming projects.

Last week, we attended the Pollard Thomas Edwards 'Happy Homes' launch. Happy Homes communicates what residents experience as positive in the design of their homes, with information from architects and multidisciplinary teams, and translates the information into a usable form. We look forward to seeing the next stage of the project, the Happy Homes ‘toolkit’, which aims to help design teams to embed ‘social value’ into their designs at the earliest stage. Image credits: Pollard Thomas Edwards #happyhomes #socialvalue

Dinah Bornat's work on child-focused design absolutely accords with our own, and so its a privilege to be working with you again Dinah Bornat

This month, Annalie Riches participated in the Design Council Homes Taskforce roundtable on urban regeneration and renewal at Park Hill, Sheffield. The roundtable was part of a series of engagements hosted by the Design Council Homes Taskforce to support Government to create a housebuilding programme which leads to well designed, sustainable homes and places. Brilliant policy ideas were shared with the Design Council which will be developed with Government and other partners. We look forward to seeing the new policy report in the new year. Thanks to Phineas Harper FRIBA Harper for organising the event. Image credits: Design Council and Sonny Malhotra