From ruined barns to residential facility

As architectural and interior design consultant, IAD was briefed to create a mixture of self-contained and shared houses for 12 residents and associated staff. Rebecca Lewis-Chapman, director at The IAD Company, discusses the thinking behind both the location and the finished design. The scheme won the Project of the Year Refurbishment Award at last May’s 2019 DiMH Awards. 

Once every few years a project comes along that stands out from all the others. Such projects are not necessarily the biggest, the most expensive, or the most ground-breaking – but they are always the most fulfilling. By this I don’t mean fulfilling in the ‘warm, fuzzy feeling’, sense of the word; I’m talking about the kind of fulfilment you get after a particularly difficult training session, or from getting the mark you grafted for in a harder-thanexpected test. I suppose another word for this type of fulfilment is pride, and the Ty Carreg project is something that The IAD Company will remain proud of for a very long time.

The West Aberthaw Barns were a collection of stone ruins located a few hundred metres away from the Aberthaw Power Station near Barry in the Vale of Glamorgan. The site consisted of several buildings, the oldest of which dates back over 800 years, in varying states of disrepair. From working with structures with most of the walls still intact, but lacking roofs or windows, through to buildings that could only be identified by the footprint of their foundations, the requirements to bring each one back to life were varied, to say the least.