Ty Darran

Location: Caerphilly, Gwent

Brick Manufacturer: wienerberger Limited

Brick Name: Marziale

Architect: Pentan Architects

Brickwork Contractor: Willmott Dixon Wales

Ty Darran is Caerphilly County Borough Council’s exemplary new later living development located in Risca, South Wales. The project provides 45 new apartments for the over 60s, a series of communal spaces, courtyard garden, and extensive landscaped grounds. As a local authority affordable housing project for the elderly, Ty Darran is remarkable in a number of key areas; It is outward looking, not hidden away like ‘sheltered’ housing so often is; located just north of the thriving town centre of Risca, it is proud to be a part of the community with local services and amenities within easy reach for residents to enjoy and maintain independence. A generous series of communal spaces, each varying in scale and use are located on the key street corner. A double height residents’ lounge at ground floor level, flexible craft, IT, and fitness studio spaces at second floor level and cosy TV space, library, small wintergarden, and games room at third floor level. All designed to gently encourage sociability within the resident community and provide opportunities for the wider community to visit and enliven the scheme. 

All our new apartments are dual aspect with generously proportioned windows, providing access to plenty of daylight, sunlight, and natural cross ventilation – so important to residents’ well-being. Balconies and terraces offer a private amenity space for every apartment connected to the spectacular valley landscape in which the project sits. Apartments are connected to a shared external walkway wrapping the courtyard garden with front doors and kitchen windows onto these walkways helping form a better-connected community within the scheme, encouraging residents to remain active and engaged, all to the benefit of their health and wellbeing. 

The soft, textural, and varied tones of the wienerberger ‘Marziale’ brickwork has been critical to the project’s success. The future residents of the scheme and the local community were given agency over many aspects of the scheme design including the material palette, inside and out, providing feedback on options at several engagement events. The use of the single brick type brings a calmness and coherence to the project. The use of a complimentary pale mortar colour – Fort Monkton White – further adds to the building reading as a single form carefully carved out to respond to its setting, provide articulation to its form, and aid the buildings’ legibility. The use of vertical stack bonded brick coursing and projecting courses help to bring a hierarchy to the elevations, to signify key openings or corners within the scheme and helps settle the building comfortably in the landscape. Complimentary metalwork and window frame colours as well as a wood fibre board used on the walkways continue a theme of warmth, softness, and friendliness to the building.

At the opening ceremony, the local mayor recounted her fears as the building emerged - at 4 storeys high - it is significantly taller than the surrounding forms of development, yet she recalled her delight at the ‘softness’ of the finished building and its ability to settle into the landscape.