Tree Top Village, Walker

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Location: Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne
Client: Your Homes Newcastle
Status: Completed 2017

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Project Description:

Completed in Spring 2017 by Wates, Tree Top Village is the culmination of 25 years of work by Newcastle City Council to encourage investment in the core of this community. Tree Top Village delivers a new heart for the Walker community in the form of an exemplar mixed-use retirement village, managed by Your Homes Newcastle (YHN), providing high quality affordable accommodation exclusively for over 55’s or people with an assessed medical need.

Phase One of the project provides 75 one and two-bedroom apartments. The apartments are arranged over four storeys, set around a communal landscaped courtyard as well as an internal atrium accommodating a range of community and retail facilities at ground floor level. Utilising this building as the main facility, the adjacent Phase Two development provides further retirement accommodation in the form of 36 one and two-bedroom homes and eight bungalows, all with individual ground floor entrances and gardens. YHN’s commitment to delivering retirement accommodation within a ‘hotel type’ environment at the centre of the community, has delighted residents in need of age-friendly housing, and given local people a new neighbourhood focus at the heart of Walker.

The community and retail facilities at Tree Top Village are open to the public, creating excitement and interest at the core of the new community, and allowing family and friends to visit and enjoy the facilities. Residents receive discounts from the commercial tenants, which include an Italian restaurant and a beauty salon.

Designed to follow the philosophy of Dr Hans Marcel Becker, which seeks to create an empowering and inclusive environment for the elderly, the development has delivered a paradigm change in older persons’ care in Walker.

Tree Top Village was awarded Outstanding Development of the Year in 2017 by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) North East. The scheme was also a finalist at the 2017 Inside Housing Development Awards in the category for ‘Best older people’s housing development (over 100 homes)’.

As architect and planning consultant for Tree Top Village, we were also delighted that, the development was a finalist in the national RTPI Awards 2018 (in the ‘Excellence in Planning for Health and Wellbeing’ category) as well as the RTPI North East Awards for Planning Excellence 2018.