Communing with the City

Courtyard communal housing isn’t something you see a lot of in London, compared to, say, Paris, Milan or Berlin – so maybe that’s why it feels like it has a certain otherly romance to it. In its latest project, a rental development in St John’s Wood, architecture and design studio Wendover has taken this typology and created a courtyard that has a very London edge to it, not least because the raw materials it had to work with were a quintessential bit of sturdy British architecture – a red-brick Victorian police station.

The project began with a speculative plot that had remained untouched. “The owner had the site for a long time, but didn’t do anything with it; it had an existing planning permission, but for whatever reason, they never went ahead with the development,” says architect Jan-Paul Coelingh, Wendover’s co-founder. “It was quite a pretty Victorian building, but had been left in a poor state,” he adds. The practice had always had an ambition to develop its own sites, and this is the first opportunity there has been for Wendover to act as both developer and client.

Behind the police station was a substantial additional area used for parking – now, it’s the new-build part of the development, wrapping the remaining three sides of the site, creating an enclosed, cobbled space at the centre. As the building makes each 90-degree turn it drops down in height, creating an eye-pleasing hierarchy while also providing outdoor roof terraces for the apartments (the new areas are a mix of residential and ancillary space such as bike and bin stores).

It is built from pale brick that nods to – but isn’t a pastiche of – the London stock brick of the police station: overscaled brick piers create the upward thrust, meeting horizontal pre-cast concrete lintels in the same creamy shade, with doors and window frames picked out in a smart olive green. Rather than the bricks per se, it is the strong, characterful, repetitive forms that are the real design language that ties together old and new, and with no cladding or false facades, both are also easy to ‘read’ in terms of how they were built.

As for the courtyard itself, there was some resistance from planners about it, says Coelingh. “We initially wanted it to be public with perhaps a café or little shop, but the council saw it as high risk when it came to things like security, so we were pushed to make it part of the residential programme.” Wendover’s co-founder Gabriel Chipperfield adds that “the planners were very apprehensive. They said, ‘so, if you’re not going to park in there, or cover it… what is it?’” Chipperfield sees the purpose of the courtyard as “first and foremost, for hanging out,” but really, the residents will make of it what they will: “We want people to tell us how they will use the space. It’s a bit of a social experiment, and we’re all trying these things for the first time.”

As for the inside of the police station, “the floor-to-floor layouts were really good, so we knew we could achieve good ceiling heights,” says Coelingh, “but space planning was still a challenge, as the floorplates are fairly narrow. Fitting in a new core and communal hallway plus the adjacent apartment in a not-very-deep building was a puzzle.”

The old cells and administrative offices are now a series of calm, neutral apartments. Wendover wasn’t tempted to lean on the building’s history with Victorian tiling or wink-wink police station references (although the blue lantern over the front door on the street side remains) – instead it’s all pared-back soft minimalism, in pale tones that tonally link with the brick new buildings that are glimpsed over on the other side of the courtyard.

This development fits into Wendover’s wider portfolio because of its site-sensitivity, and its architecture that is full of character yet without any trace of self-indulgent flourishes. “We like to design contemporary architecture that’s embedded and related to what’s there, but still with a strong signature,” says Coelingh. “That has been a driving force on this project.”