Ward’s House starts on site

Ward’s House, a new boarding house at leading independent school Wycliffe College, starts on site this week in the small town of Stonehouse in the Cotswolds.

The proposed building replaces and improves upon an existing boarding house and provides flexible and modern boarding to the school. Particular attention has been paid to the design of a room model that is flexible and adaptable, and can easily change to meet a varied boarder profile each year. The current model houses 55 boarders in a mixture of single and twin en-suite rooms and 32 flexi-boarder and day boarder rooms. The main aim is to allow flexibility in the number and type of boarders, and to be able to serve as a single or co-educational house.

The material choices are sympathetic to the College’s historic buildings with buff-multi brick walls, crisp zinc roof and deep reveals to the windows picked out in pale stone; which add depth to, and enliven the brick facades.

In plan the building is angled, sitting amongst the existing trees on site. Its scale is articulated and visually reduced by breaking the roofline with chimneys that house extensive ventilation systems, and by creating an extruded entrance to the ground floor.

The development of Ward’s House was underpinned by a strategic masterplan of the Senior School Campus.