Preference 5. Clear but welcoming public–private transitions
The interface zone between public street and private home has a complex range of functions, all making its design one of the most challenging but impactful aesthetic problems.
Front gardens, porches, and inviting thresholds create legible and welcoming transitions between public and private space.
In the award-winning Marmalade Lane development in Cambridge, the whole of this central street acts as a transition space, allowing multiple functions, including play, socialisation, bicycle and bin storage, growing food, privacy, personalisation, shading, and a location for air source heat pumps. It can achieve this, in part, because of the absence of parking, but also because of clever design which delivers its own sense of functional beauty that is clearly also both welcoming and robust.
Blank walls, neglected edges, or hard boundaries are disliked.
When public/private transitions fail to consider key functions or are otherwise dominated by them, they are often ugly. Here, first, no space is provided for wheelie bins which are consequently left on the street. Next, bin storage dominates to such a degree it creates barriers between the homes. Then, a high wall forms the interface, behind which other transition functions are hidden from view. In the final example, there is no real interface, only a grating to conceal ground floor parking, resulting in a hostile, blank street frontage.