Located off Broadway Market, south of London Fields, Ada Street accommodates 6 apartments above two small retail units. This is on of London's poorer east-end areas combining the largest number of different languages spoken in the city with the largest population of artists per square kilometre in Europe. This is reflected in the creative shops, bars and clubs and in the Local Authority's more relaxed approach to design aesthetics. Our client expressed an ambition for utility and unadorned domesticity. The practice's general strategy is to find a binding aesthetic form using an architectonic narrative with a reduced material palette. The detail illustrates the extension of this logic through the use of fewer, yet standard products to reduce construction junction types, associated specialist trades, their time on site and given the budget, pre-empting costs. Externally, the Dryvit insulated render system, certified to 24 degrees from the horizontal, is used to perform a number of roles eliminating need for copings, sills, external gutters and drains. Primarily to weather external walls and the upper pitched roof form. Around window openings it forms reveals and returns to an integral sloping cill. At roof level the system returns over the parapet as a coping which terminates against the roof coverings. Lastly at the base the integral dpc avoids an overlap of trades when sealing and building. Together with Velfac's glazing and Guaranteed Asphalt's inverted flat roof the external envelope is reduced to three products and trades. This reduction is followed through internally where precast concrete planks are left as exposed soffits and floors are power flated concrete. This standard floor build-up was engineered to meet acoustic performance requirements without the need for suspended plasterboard ceilings or raised floors. The resultant savings permit the use of under floor heating and 5 amp lighting circuits throughout, allowing better room layout flexibility, with no radiators or pendants determining furniture arrangements.