coombes : everitt Your Sector Bradbury Gardens – Cheltenham
NSC Bradbury Gardens - Cheltenham
Project type
Specialist Care - Residential accommodation
Client
National Star College
Scope
Award winning specialist residential accommodation
Status
Completed 2015
The main driver was to create a building that felt like a home from home for the students. We used a number of design considerations to achieve this including use of domestic finishes over medical fittings, wet rooms that feel like any household bathroom and concealed overhead hoist systems.
The positioning of the buildings through the site ensure that it is sympathetic to its surrounding. Rather than impacting on the historic Pitville Park, Bradbury Gardens acts as a perfect transition between the manicured school playing fields of Dunally primary school and the Grade 2 listed park.
The use of green roofs, private outdoor space, wild flower planting and incorporating existing trees, helps the building reflect its location with an established landscape from day one.
The site was surrounded by a mixture of residential styles and as such we felt an appropriate approach was to design a scheme that had its own architectural style. Due to the scale of the development a range of building types were proposed including 3 storey town houses, flats and semi-detached houses.
The scale of the buildings diminishes as you move through the site. The front buildings are two storeys high and reflect the scale of the domestic properties that address the street from which the scheme is accessed. As you move through the site the scale reduces to single storey buildings with low pitched green roofs. This reduction in scale helps to minimise the impact of the development on the adjacent listed park.
The £6m project was officially opened by her Royal Highness the Duchess of Gloucester in September 2015. At the opening the Duchess commented.
“Bradbury Gardens is beautiful. You said you wanted to create a place where we’d all like to live. You have achieved that.”
