Championing Housing Innovation and Community-Driven Design

Archio’s Kyle Buchanan shares insights on the challenges and triumphs of creating homes that balance quality, innovation, and community impact.

Kyle Buchanan is a director at London-based architecture company Archio. The practice was successful in the 2023 British Homes Awards and in 2024, Buchanan was part of the judging panel. He says, “My overall impression is that of just how much work is put in, in our industry, into designing amazing homes, and the level of endeavour and commitment that it takes to execute, and particularly to build a project of any scale. I'm very proud to be part of an industry that takes so much pride in the outcome of the work that it delivers, there was a lot of thought and care put into the discussions about who the eventual winners should be.”

Archio were on the other side of the fence the previous year, winning the Affordable Housing category for Citizens House, a project in Lewisham, south London, which was the result of a campaign by local people to build Community Land Trust (CLT) homes on surplus council owned land. “It's had an outsized impact in terms of demonstrating what good can look like and what a good process can look like,” Buchanan says, “We had 107 letters of support for that application. People talk about planning and resident objections being a barrier to delivering homes, but actually what we demonstrated was that if you engage residents and local people in the process, there's actually huge support for housing when it's trying to tackle the right things.”  

Indeed the concept of community land trusts is something Archio is passionate about as Buchanan explains, “ They are really about groups of local people saying that they need to take action within their own community to provide housing because there is a shortage and that is impacting the cohesion of their community. So to put that in simple terms: if your kids or your neighbours can't afford to live in the area they've grown up in, then that kind of community is going to start to disperse, and it’s really important to be able to be part of those support networks. It's a real challenge in the general unaffordability of housing in the UK.”

On a much different scale from Citizens House, Buchanan talks about Archio’s contribution to the Becontree Estate, a large-scale scheme established in the 1920s under the ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ pledge for servicemen post-World War I. “It's the biggest public housing scheme ever delivered,” he says, adding that stylistically, “It’s kind of deliberate distancing from Victorian architecture, very pared back, it’s almost described as like an English modernism. There were 91 house types in the original estate. So we thought about our contribution as almost a 92nd type for the 21st century.” The result is created as two villas to reduce the impact on the surrounding low-rise housing and referencing the Neo-Georgian architecture of the estate. Details such as exaggerated dormers, semicircular entrance arches and round windows, playfully referencing nearby houses.

Reflecting on the sector for 2025, Buchanan adds, “I obviously really welcome the focus from central government on housing. I think the industry is waiting for the spending review in the spring to really understand what financial support there is going to be for housing. Because it is a very challenging time at the moment, in terms of the cost of construction and a very under-resourced planning system that's slow to make decisions, which is something that affects a lot of people in my profession, and in development more generally. My big hope is that in the focus on delivering the quantity of homes, which is obviously really important, there's also room for robust discussions about quality and about making sure that we still recognise the importance of designing and delivering really good homes. The British Homes Awards is an important part of the discussion around what good looks like.”