Bermondsey Community Nursery has been transformed into a light, bright learning space for pre school children in the heart of Shad Thames. The brief was to completely overhaul the nursery accommodation and increase the number of childcare places for local families.
The completed project relocates the office and staff accommodation into a new extension to create 10 additional child spaces in the main nursery. These spaces are grouped around a maple tree to provide a picturesque and calming focal point in an otherwise busy urban environment.
In the Cotswolds, Bureau de Change have reinterpreted the rural vernacular to create a new home using interlocking barn forms and a palette of local materials.
Billy Mavropoulos, Co-Founder of Bureau de Change, explains how the design drew on traces of the site’s former use: ‘We took the elongated forms of two 30 metre-long, timber chicken sheds as the starting point for the new design. The house then became a play of traditional barn volumes which have been pushed and pulled to suit the needs of the client.’
This house lies on a mid-century modern estate in Holland Park by celebrated architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. Built in 1966, the estate features red brick terraces with integrated garages and generous communal gardens.
The project included a rear extension in matching brick, internal refurbishment and new landscaping. Original internal partitions were removed to create flexible open plan living spaces. A new winding stair is finished in powder coated steel and oak. This compact stair results in significant additional useable floor area on each level.
Somerset family farm enterprise, Yeo Valley, also Britain’s leading organic dairy brand, is expanding on the success of both its dairy product range and its Blagdon-based farm, café and garden in deepest Somerset by opening its very first London outlet, comprised of a two-storey café, shop and workspace on Queensway in west London, designed by award-winning South West creative agency Phoenix Wharf.
About Yeo Valley
The Yeo Valley business has been developed over two generations. From the acquisition of its first Blagdon farm in 1961 to becoming a successful organic dairy producer with a British Friesian herd, adding beef cattle, sheep and a second farm along the way, Yeo Valley went on to work with other co-operative farmers and fruit-growers and is now Britain’s leading organic dairy brand, as well as a thriving local centre of activity. Offering hospitality in the form of an award-winning Canteen and access to a beautiful, Soil Association-certified organic garden, the company’s Blagdon HQ also offers a lively events calendar throughout the year, including educational trips, art days, garden masterclasses and a ‘Farm to Fridge’ day, with all food produced and cooked on site. As a brand, Yeo Valley is synonymous with the quality of its products and its ethical approach to animal husbandry, with the farm’s famous herd digitally-monitored, given only the best organic feed and mattresses to sleep on. The Mead family, who run both the farms and the Yeo Valley enterprise, speak regularly about an approach to business and farming that’s good for animals, people and nature, drawing on the wisdom and experience of family head, Mary Mead OBE.
Box House is constructed using Studio Bark’s innovative U-Build construction system. Please see our U-Build website for more information.
The scheme is one of 10 pilot houses, built side by side as the first street in Graven Hill, Bicester: a pioneering development of 1900 Custom and Self Build houses (CSH). The Graven Hill project is of national significance, a ‘vanguard’ project aiming to help the government double the CSH market by 2020.
The clients, Chris and Roxie, wanted to be involved in the construction of their house and were interested in the benefits associated with prefabricated (off-site) housing. However, they did not have the budget to pay for an external contractor, nor the specialist skills to lead the build process themselves. In response to this challenging brief, Studio Bark developed an innovative system of CNC cut timber building blocks, later coined as U-Build, designed to provide a robust and affordable self-build solution for keen self-builders with limited construction experience.
Our clients bought this large Victorian house looking to make it their long term family home. They wanted to invest in the property to make an improvement to their quality and enjoyment of life. Key to their brief was to extend to the rear to form a new open-plan kitchen, living and dining room. The original kitchen-diner was incredibly cold for six months of the year (to the point of being uninhabitable!), so options for improving thermal performance and heating systems were also to be explored.
This mid-terrace Victorian house in Brook Green was reconfigured and extended to create a dramatic vertical space. An opening was formed in the floor at raised ground level, connecting the reception rooms with the kitchen and dining room below. A new douglas fir stair descends through this double-height volume, and the lowest three steps form part of the precast concrete work surface.
Rectory House is located in a small village within the South Downs National Park. Our client’s aspiration was to improve the entrance experience to the property – this aspect never being satisfactorily resolved when the old school building was converted into a residential home.
Description of the Works
A generous new porch provides an appropriate transition space between the courtyard and main entrance hall. The setting required an extremely sensitive design approach, for which we drew inspiration from the detailing of the existing building. The new structure was formed in brick and stone, with handmade red brickwork framing roughly-hewn clunch stone walling with a plinth and traditional quoins. Feature stones were precision cut by machine to perfectly match existing window details and to form entirely new elements, such as the arched surround to the porch entrance. The surround is designed to reflect the form and proportions of the existing elevation, and aligned on axis with the existing entrance door; subtly tying these elements together and one of a number of moves that help fuse the extension to the original building. The roof is pitched and tiled with red clay tiles, with a scalloped banding detail and dark roll-top ridge.
This 3 bedroom family house is set in 4 acres at the edge of a Lancashire village in the UK. The brief required a house that was laid out over 2 storeys but could accommodate inclusive lifetime homes standards for ground floor living, and whilst open plan in layout could retain the function of accommodating distinct rooms.
In response, a series of interconnecting living spaces link though disappearing corner sliding doors to create an open plan ground floor, that opens on three sides to outdoor garden ‘rooms’ that capture light at different times of the day.A second storey adds a master bedroom suite with framed views of the hills beyond.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
