Aisher House Sevenoaks School, Kent Education Building, Best New Southern English Architecture Project

Aisher House, Sevenoaks School

4 May 2022

2022 RIBA Southeast Award winners announced

Seven projects have been awarded Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Southeast Awards.

Aisher House, Sevenoaks School, Kent, south east England, UK

Design: Tim Ronalds Architects

photograph : Tim Ronalds Architects

Aisher House at Sevenoaks School

Jury Report

The new boarding house for boys at Sevenoaks School combines a skilful response to a complex brief with a confident piece of placemaking.

The site for the new building is the front lawn of Park Grange, a listed Victorian villa at the southern end of Sevenoaks High Street. The architects have demonstrated a sophisticated and intuitive understanding of this setting. The new building is split into three pavilions, echoing the form of the listed villa, and placed so as to complement it in scale. To echo the Victorian villa’s materials without resorting to pastiche, bespoke ceramic tiles were developed for the new building’s façade. These are an unusual T-shape to allow a hit-and-miss appearance – giving a cadence of light and shade similar to that of the villa’s stone walls.

photograph : David Merewether

A boarding house such as this has very particular requirements, catering for boys across a range of ages, and requiring cooking, laundry and other ‘home-from-home’ facilities in addition to bedrooms and bathrooms. These are all spacious and comfortable, and crucially are linked together by generous social and communal spaces, the latter occupying most of the ground floor. These in turn open out to a courtyard BBQ area outside the house kitchen and the common room opens onto the main lawn for events and games. Adding to the complexity, staff also live in the building, and the design cleverly allows their ‘houses’ to feel independent, with their own separate entrances.

photo : David Merewether

The boarding house seeks to use sustainable approaches too: the structure is of CLT, on a thin concrete raft, which minimises embodied carbon: the house is all electric, has MVHR ventilation systems and its heat comes from an air source heat pump installation.

photo : Tim Ronalds Architects

RIBA region: Southeast
Architect practice: Tim Ronalds Architects
Date of completion: 07 2019
Date of occupation: 08 2019
Client company name: Sevenoaks School Foundation
Project city/town: Kent
Gross internal area: 2,367.00 m²
Net internal area: 0.00 m²
Contractor company name: Gilbert-Ash

photo : Tim Ronalds Architects

Consultants

Structural Engineers: Eckersley O’Callaghan
Environmental / M&E Engineers: Max Fordham
Quantity Surveyor / Cost Consultant: Bristow Consulting
Landscape Architects: Wirtz International
Acoustic Engineers: Max Fordham

Awards

• RIBA Regional Award
• Regional Award Short List

Tim Ronalds Architects

2022 RIBA Southeast Award Winners

2022 RIBA Southeast Award winners

Aisher House, Sevenoaks School, Kent – 2022 RIBA Southeast Award winners images / information received 040522