Regenerative Housing and Landscape Strategy
Revitalising Taunton’s town centre
Apartment Store is the Davidson Prize 2024 winning and People’s Choice entry, created in collaboration with Studio Saar and Proper Good Films. The project reimagines Taunton’s former Debenhams department store as a living hub for the new economy: a place where town centre housing, making, learning and growing happen under one roof. Community owned, codesigned “steppingstone homes” on the upper floors give young people smaller, more affordable homes with generous shared spaces, while the ground floor becomes a circular skills hub with tools library, repair and making spaces, education areas and a Commoning Room for local decision making. The roof is transformed into a productive landscape for collective food growing and social life in the heart of the town.
The Brief
The competition asked teams to explore adaptive reuse: how redundant department stores and other vacant buildings might be transformed, using biobased materials and circular design, into thriving places that respond to the housing crisis and help revive struggling high streets.
Our Approach
Landstory’s role was to help treat the building as part of a wider living system – social, ecological and economic. Working closely with Studio Saar and the wider team, we read existing patterns of place, history, culture and community activity in Taunton. The project was seeking to explore what role the building could take in relation to the dying high street and challenges the town faces around affordable homes. The proposal shows how circular economy thinking, local materials and community ownership can bring life back to a landmark building and in turn regenerate the city centre.
The Challenges
The project needed to unlock a deepplan retail building that was never designed for homes, gardens or workshops. Daylight, access, structural constraints and fire strategy all had to be considered alongside acoustic privacy and the expectations residents have of contemporary housing. There was also a strong emotional context: the Debenhams building carries memories for many local people. The scheme therefore had to respect this legacy while proposing a bold new use, and to balance commercial reality with the ambition for community ownership and low carbon transformation.
The Outcome
The proposal was recognised by the Davidson Prize jury and public voters for offering a credible, hopeful model of town centre regeneration. Apartment Store shows how a single vacant building can become a community led, sustainable asset – delivering affordable homes, new routes and public spaces, a circular skills hub and a visible demonstration of low carbon living. The project has sparked wider conversations in Taunton about community land ownership, adaptive reuse and how to harness vacant retail space for local benefit.
The Future
We ran a series of workshops with the local community members which has galvanised a local community group into action. With the building on the market for sale, the group are mobilising to find finance to take forwards this ambitious and community led project.
The project in numbers
Awards
Workshops
Film
Visualisations
Landstory’s facilitation of the Apartment Store workshops following their and Studio SAAR’s win of the Davidson Prize in 2024, brought together a disparate group of individuals from a range of organisations and cemented them into a dedicated group intent on securing a community focussed use for the former Debenhams building in Taunton. Their sensitive and unhurried approach allowed the group to find common ground, identify individual strengths and agree a way to tackle the challenges ahead.