Royal opening for Ward’s-Ivy Grove

Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Gloucester has officially opened Ward's-Ivy Grove, our new £6 million boarding house for leading independent school Wycliffe College.

Set within the school’s Cotswolds estate, the new building replaces and brings together a boys' house and a girls' house into a single, flexible and modern mixed-use boarding housing for more than 80 students.

Central to the design has been the integration of a flexible room module, developed to help the school respond to a changing 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 adapt to annual variations in pupil gender, age, and type of boarder.

Social and shared spaces have been accommodated both at the heart of the plan and throughout the floor levels, while 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.

Externally, the 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, with a contrasting selection of light buff multi coloured brickwork with deep window reveals lined with cast Portland stone, and contrasting dark zinc roofing.

The development of Ward's-Ivy Grove was underpinned by a strategic masterplan of the senior school campus, also completed by the practice.