FEATURE
VALLÉE VINERY The Guernsey Housing Association’s latest development, Vallée Vinery in St Martin’s, has recently welcomed its new residents. A mix of rental and partial ownership properties, the houses were in high demand when they were completed at the end of the summer, with all of them tenanted within a fortnight.
The Guernsey Housing Association (GHA) has built 16 two and threebedroom houses on the site, with nine for rent and seven for partial ownership. It’s a development that the non-profit organisation has been wanting to pursue for some time, as development manager Phil Roussel explained: “It’s a former vinery site which we cleared quite a while ago. We laid it to grass while we waited for planning permission so that we had a good idea of what we were dealing with and it looked a little better for the neighbours. “It took us three designs and around two years to get planning permission for these houses through a rounding off policy that classified this area as completing the neighbouring estate of States housing. There is still a field to one side of the site which will continue to be used for agricultural land as that area wasn’t classed as necessary to round off the site, so we don’t have permission at this stage to use it for housing.” The new houses are situated off La Route des Coutures in St Martin’s. The new development’s name comes
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Guernsey Property and Construction
from the site’s former life as the GHA thought it was a good way to mark its history by retaining the identity of the original La Vallée Vinery. The houses themselves are a fairly standard offering for the GHA, with a real focus on build quality. For Phil, while the construction is key, they also do their best to make the houses attractive: “We have a standard specification that we give to the architect we are using on our project, and in this case he came up with these houses. They might not be the most architecturally exciting but they have got some nice features and, most importantly, they are good quality houses which have all the things you’d want from a property. “While we do standardise our homes in a lot of ways, we also try to add in little quirks to differentiate our properties. These houses, for example, have a diagonal wall upstairs on the three bedrooms and the stairs are a bit different to our other designs. These properties are also far more neutral in colour than our last development, which was quite bright.”
