Stonewood Design wins go-ahead for additions to Bath school
After a ‘year-long battle’ Stonewood Design has won permission for a series of additions to Kingswood School in Bath’s conservation area.
The practice secured the go-ahead for new classrooms, hall building and nursery on the tree-lined site at the independent co-educational boarding and day school.
The school recently worked with Piers Taylor’s previous practice Mitchell Taylor Workshop on its new humanities building and the latest scheme, which will create new accommodation for the preparatory school, sits within the framework of the school’s strategic masterplan.
According to Stonewood Design, the project will allow the school to ‘reaccommodate facilities in a fit-for-purpose new school building’ which includes classrooms for years 5 and 6, music, art, technology and design facilities and a school hall.
A spokesman said: ’The new buildings will take the form of a collection of pitched and hipped roofs. Roofs and walls will be clad in western red cedar shingles, a woodland crafted response, with a scale that children can relate to.
‘A plinth is formed in a tactile brick which has the tones of Bath stone, relating the building to the wider school site and the World Heritage City.’
Previous plans to build three houses on the plot were rejected in 1996, and the latest proposals also came in for criticism from locals with one couple claiming that Kingswood School was ‘empire building again’.
The project is due to begin construction after the summer and is scheduled to complete in early 2018.