Lancer Square Kensington Church Street, London W8 Property News, Apartments Development Plans

Lancer Square, Kensington Church Street, London, W8 4EP

9 February 2022

Landscape design: Scape Design; Buildings design: Squire & Partners

Location: Kensington Church Street, West London, England, UK

New Garden Square Brings Tranquil Retreat to Kensington W8

Lancer Square Kensington

A garden square created by Scape Design has recently been completed in the Kensington Palace conservation area of West London, providing high-quality public realm and private landscape areas for Lancer Square, a new mixed-use development of 36 world-class apartments, retail and restaurants designed by Squire & Partners.

Located in the centre of the site, the garden square provides a green heart to the development, inspired by the site’s palatial and horticultural heritage as part of the original Kensington Palace grounds. While thoroughly contemporary in its appeal and designed for residents, local workers and international visitors alike, the influence of the palace’s courtyards, orangery and sunken garden can be seen in the courtyard grid and in some of the plantings, including boxed headed hornbeams, boxed leaf holly and common yew hedging together with specimen shaped boxed leaf clipped balls.

While intimate in scale, the courtyard provides all year-round interest with an array of flowering blooms from February to December, as well as fabulous leaf colours in spring and autumn. Intermittent displays of flowering perennials, from red hot pokers, geraniums and catmint interplanted with alliums, to irises and tulips, between them ensure bold splashes of colour throughout the year. English lavender, euphorbia, hebe veronica and honeysuckle lend scent and further colour to the experience. In line with meeting all required BREAM standards in this conservation area, planting was also selected to promote increased biodiversity, offering essential corridors for insects, birds and local wildlife.

Figurative sculptures from Based Upon, inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, add a finishing touch of magic, both playfully looking down upon a larger abstract sculpture inspired by rotated forms of the garden grid. This piece is located to greet visitors as they enter the gardens whilst capturing the hues, sunlight and evening illumination of the square. A contemporary water feature forms the garden’s centrepiece where benches allow visitors to rest and reflect.

Scape Design also designed private loggias and terraces for the apartments and worked closely with the architects to frame new pedestrian routes to the garden square and also enhance surrounding streetscapes.

“The landscape delivers an exceptional destination tailored to the residents, businesses and visitors of Lancer Square,” says Philip Jaffa, Founder of Scape Design. “Located off Kensington Church Street, and just behind the ever-busy Kensington High Street, the garden is a secluded oasis that sits well within its historical and contemporary context.”

Philip Jaffa

Philip founded Scape Design Associates in 2000, a practice that is today internationally recognised as a leading designer of luxury residential and tourism destinations from a masterplanning and environmental perspective, as well as for the design of high-quality mixed-use and public realm projects. Philip’s commitment to progressive design means that Scape is both pioneering and questioning in its desire to harmonise commercial pressures with the need to address the global impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. Through their work, Philip and his team are advocates of new approaches to reintroducing nature in the urban fabric and of new kinds of tourism that encourage us to live in conscious relationship with the planet.

Last year, Philip collaborated with artist Es Devlin to design the award-winning “Forest for Change” at the London Design Biennale, swiftly followed by the “Conference of The Trees” at COP26 Glasgow, both advocating action on climate change and the legacy planting of urban forests. Currently, the practice is engaged in the design of a number of boutique eco-responsible resort projects in Mediterranean Europe and the Canary Islands.
www.scapeda.co.uk

Squire & Partners

Lancer Square, Kensington Church StreetDevelopment images / information received 080222

Location: Lancer Square, Kensington Church Street, London, W8 4EP, UK

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