Why smaller developments can create better communities

There is a threshold, somewhere between forty and sixty homes, where a residential building stops being a place and starts being infrastructure. Below it, you recognise the person collecting their parcel. Above it, the lobby becomes a corridor between a lift and a car park.

We keep our developments small partly for that reason and partly for a more practical one: at thirty-six homes, every layout can be resolved individually. Nothing has to be repeated eighty times to be worth drawing.

Smaller sites also let a building sit properly in its street. Morrow House is six storeys because the shophouses opposite are three and the estate blocks behind are five. That is not a concession — it is the reason the building will still look right in twenty years.

The trade-off is real. Fewer homes means the cost of the garden, the lounge and the pavilion is shared across fewer buyers. We would rather spend that budget on a courtyard everybody uses daily than on a facilities deck photographed once for the brochure.

What we get in return is a building where the shared spaces are used. The garden pavilion is booked most weekends. The lounge has become somebody’s Tuesday office. That is the argument for building less.