Ashfield Court
Thirty-two homes behind a retained wall
Location
Marylebone, London
Typology
Residential
Status
In Design
Completion
2028
In a conservation area the facade is not yours to design. We think that is a gift, not a restriction.
A courtyard block on a constrained Marylebone site, built behind a retained Victorian street wall and topped in patinated bronze.
Project data
- Typology
- Residential
- Apartments
- 32
- Site depth
- 11 – 19 m
- Courtyard
- 14 m across, planted
- Retained fabric
- Locally listed street wall
- Upper cladding
- Unlacquered solid bronze
- Certification
- BREEAM Outstanding (targeted)
- Completion
- 2028
- Coordinates
- 51.5203° N, 0.1543° W
A listed wall and eleven metres of depth
The site is 46 metres of Marylebone street frontage and, in places, only eleven metres deep. The Victorian stock brick wall to Chiltern Street is locally listed and must remain, including its window openings.
Every previous application had treated the wall as a problem to be worked around. We treated it as the plan — the building simply begins behind it.
Deep plan is impossible, so go around a void
Thirty-two apartments wrap a single courtyard 14 metres across. No apartment is deeper than 9.5 metres, which means every habitable room in the scheme is within 4 metres of a window.
The courtyard is planted and open to the sky. It is also the only circulation — there are no internal corridors anywhere in the building.
Bronze that is allowed to go green
Above the retained wall, two setback storeys are clad in solid bronze sheet, unlacquered. It will patinate from copper to brown to green over roughly fifteen years, and there is no maintenance regime to stop it.
The planning officer asked what the building would look like in 2060. It was the best question anyone asked during the application.
We specified a material precisely because we could not control how it would age. That is the whole argument of the building.
— Matthias Reuter, Chief Executive
The building as a study model, not a render.
Every scheme begins as stacked volumes on the studio table. This is that model, rebuilt — it turns with the page, and it shows the argument of the building rather than a marketing image of it.
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