Marchbank Studios

The business case was unforgiving. For the trust's model to work, the building had to deliver a certain number of lettable square metres at a rent that working makers could actually pay, on a site that was too small for the number.

Internal corridors were the first thing to go.

Circulation on the outside

All access is via external decks and stairs on the north elevation, in galvanised steel, open to the weather but covered. This is a normal enough move for housing and unusual for workspace, and it recovers close to four hundred square metres that would otherwise have been corridor.

It also changes the social character of the building in a way we did not fully predict. Everyone passes everyone. The trust reports that cross-referrals between makers are running well above what they saw at their previous premises, and several tenants have cited the decks specifically.

Studios that can change size

Party walls between studios are non-structural and built to a repeating module. Two adjacent studios can be combined, or a large one split, in about a day and a half by the trust's own maintenance team.

In the first eight months, six studios changed size. A conventional fit-out would have made each of those changes a small construction project.

The workshop

The shared workshop at ground level is the reason many tenants sign. It has the extraction, the three-phase supply and the machines that no individual maker can justify.

Shared plant is the only thing that makes small studios viable. Design it first, not last.

Putting it at ground level with roller shutters directly onto the yard was the single most requested item in consultation, and the only one nobody argued about.