Oakwell Grange has been designed in a way which combines sustainability and safety with contemporary luxury and considerate design to meet the pressing need for both private and affordable housing provision within London, and the exacting demands of contemporary suburban family life. The scheme remains sensitive to the existing vernacular in terms of height, scale and appearance whilst delivering enhanced character to the local area.
In their facades, massing and density, units identify with the architectural principles of the ‘new London vernacular’, though both they, and the masterplan, employ a suburban twist.
Across the range of two- and three-storey detached and semi-detached housing, punched windows with deep recesses, clear entrance points and differential treatments between ground floor and upper facades are integrated with pitched roofs with alternating hips and gable ends and parapet walls. This introduces dynamism and visual excitement through street scenes which have been designed to flow at right angles to complement the angularity of the architecture moving through the site.
Elevations are predominantly faced in stretcher-bonded Ibstock Brick’s Leicester Ivanhoe Cream, a multi-hued buff stock brick with sandcreased texture that offers a material reference to traditional Victorian and Georgian housing fronting on to Chandos Street.
These sharp full brick volumes offer simplicity and style, contrasting perfectly with the dark window frames, cumaru timber louvres, slate grey tiles and charcoal powder coated aluminium roof lights.
Large linear panels of projecting bricks in a snapped header detail align strategically with fenestration through to roof level, breaking up the brickwork mass and adding a unique texture to principal elevations which are largely uncluttered, other than by the flanking rainwater systems and subtle dentil corbel brick detail beneath gutters.
Brick built boundary walls in the same Ivanhoe Cream brickwork frame the external landscaping, helping to characterise and unify appearance throughout the scheme.
