The Sir Michael Snyder Building, Brentwood School Boarding House

Location: Brentwood, Essex

Brick Manufacturers: Ibstock PLC / Non-UK

Brick Names: Heritage Red Blend / Antro

Architect: Cottrell & Vermeulen Architecture

Brickwork Contractor: Global Brickwork

This project for an independent secondary school creates a welcome addition to the campus with the new boarding house. The brief consolidates boys’ and girls’ accommodation, previously located on separate sites, expanding the current capacity of 65 to over 120 boarders.

At the southern entry point to Brentwood, beyond more suburban dispersed residential structures, the last large remaining plot on campus offered the opportunity to create a new home for the boarding house and a gateway to the town centre. Overlooking Shenfield Common, the facilities create a much-improved social experience for boarders, focusing on issues of wellbeing through well-designed environments. The building integrates 123 study bedrooms, all with en-suite shower facilities, alongside a communal dining room, kitchens, separate staff accommodation and dedicated landscaped social space.

The school has grown accretively over more than 460 years, organised around a sequence of courtyards and quadrangles. In recent years a series of Cottrell & Vermeulen designed projects have sought to reinforce this collegiate pattern and made new connections between these courtyard spaces. The new boarding development follows this pattern and completes the sequence.

The range of school buildings to the eastern side of Ingrave Road are predominantly brick and plain tile structures, including the Sixth Form Centre and Assembly Hall, the first building completed by Cottrell and Vermeulen in 2011. The new Boarding House continues our built legacy, bringing the school campus into greater visibility in marking the southern boundary of the campus.

The boarding house takes cues from the Mansion Block typology and early Edwardian Arts and Crafts apartment blocks, felt to be appropriate in terms of scale and location. The traditional elements of vernacular architecture: gables, pitched roofs and chimneys give a domestic character to the larger, more repetitive structure. Arches, bullseye windows, cast stone and polychromatic brickwork elements are arranged to give visual appeal through asymmetry, depth and variation, also reflecting the internal inhabitation.

The new block was built to exacting environmental standards. Underneath the brick skin, a composite structure was adopted to reduce overall embodied carbon: CLT was used to form the cellular study bedrooms of the upper storeys while a concrete podium slab spans the larger communal spaces at ground floor level. This approach was echoed in the building services which are fossil fuel free, utilizing mechanical ventilation and heat recovery throughout, with air-source heat pumps served from a separate curved brick energy station formed adjacent.

Brickwork is central to the architectural character of the building, with the main body formed in Ibstock heritage red blend bricks using quarter bond and contrasting Vandersanden Antro used for polychromatic brick details. Traditional forms evoking domestic qualities are combined with playful and contemporary elements, defining window openings complemented by cast stone plinth details and frieze panels. Prefabricated brick arches form arcades, each carefully integrated into the façade alongside circular openings in hand-laid brick to each stair tower.

Cottrell & Vermeulen Architecture would like to commend the main contractor and brickwork subcontractors who worked tirelessly throughout the construction process to realise this complex project.