Buttress Architects | Ward’s-Ivy Grove, Wycliffe College

Ward’s House is a new boarding house at leading independent school, Wycliffe College. The building replaces and improves upon an existing boarding house to provide flexible and modern boarding to the school.

Set within the school’s Cotswolds estate, the external design is a contemporary interpretation of the historic Georgian and Victorian limestone and brick buildings that are found both on the site and the surrounding area of Stroud. This design response is reflected in the scale, massing, vertical window proportions and the external materials chosen.

The boarding house provides accommodation for 55 full time boarders and 32-day/flexi boarders across three main floors, in a mixture of single, twin, and quad flexi rooms, all with ensuite facilities. Social and shared spaces have been accommodated both at the heart of the plan and throughout the floor levels. Two apartments and two bedsits provide accommodation for the boarding house’s male and female houseparent’s and assistants at apposing ends of the building.
Central to the design has been the integration of a flexible room module, developed to help the school respond to a varied boarder profile.

The core room module and furniture configuration can be adapted from two single rooms to either a twin, quad flexi, or accessible room, or visa-versa. Allowing the school to cater to annual changes in pupil sex, ages, and type of boarder.

This has been achieved by the incorporation of a predesigned and prebuilt ‘knock out’ panel, which can easily be removed or built in by the school during the summer vacation period, while maintaining the required acoustic and fire performance.
In citing the building’s profile, an important consideration was the retention of a number of mature trees that surround the site, including a memorial tree planted in 1966. The result is a ‘cranked’ articulated plan configuration which, on one side, provides entrances and a frontage to the school’s entrance driveway, cricket pitches and main school buildings. The opposite facade faces the public highway, with the existing dense tree enclosure offering privacy with a south facing garden and terrace recreation space.

To further integrate the building within the site, the scale of the building reflects that of the historic three storey buildings on the site and uses a contrasting selection of light buff multi coloured brickwork with deep window reveals lined with cast Portland stone, and contrasting dark zinc roofing. The overall massing of the long elevations has been reduced at ground floor level to the south, with a projecting single storey that houses the main common rooms and one of the house parent’s apartment accommodation.