Our Between Towns Road scheme in Oxford for Watkin Jones has completed on site. The project, now renamed Between Towns Court is a purpose-built managed student accommodation development of 144 bedrooms, arranged in clusters of 3 to 10 and including 4 self-contained studios. At ground floor a commercial unit helps to activate the frontage along with a shared common room and a management suite.
The ’parti’ adopts elements of collegiate design namely the wall, a lodge, quadrangles and staircases.
The accommodation is arranged in pavilion buildings, the front 3 are perpendicular to Between Towns Road to create a rhythm to the currently fragmented streetscape. Divided in two with a cluster of bedrooms to both the front and back, these rise to 5 storeys along Between Towns Road and drop down to 3 storeys to the back of the site in response to the single storey primary school behind. These 3 blocks are unified by a low level collegiate wall to the back of the pavement to enclose the private gardens beyond. A fourth pavilion is located to the back of the site. Conceived as a smaller garden block, this building is slimmer and only 3 storeys in height. A bridge, which houses a common room, connects the garden pavilion and also acts as a gateway to a private pedestrian route that accesses external staircases between each road facing block.
The external walls are buff brick with an acid etched concrete string course to each floor slab edge. Glazing is flush with the external face of the walls with recessed aluminium vent panels all detailed in bronze coloured aluminium.