Holland Green

These three new blocks have been orientated at 45° to Kensington High Street. The different sizes of the three cube-like buildings echo their context; the smallest block responds to the park, the middle one to the street, and the largest to the height of the institute’s sweeping roof, and they are all surrounded by landscaping from Dutch firm West 8.

The windows reflect the glazing of the Commonwealth Institute while the blocks’ strict forms erode away at the corners, where terraces or projecting forms can be found. The regimented Jura limestone facades are a combination of two schemes that were rejected during planning consultations.

The residential buildings are ‘sculptures in a park’, with gridded forms that contain the apartments in a supportive neutral geometry. The patterning of their facades allows for a diversity of individual apartment layouts, which are expressed in the facade by balconies, projecting bays and recessed terraces. These create a diverse and unique composition for each facade. It also allows private open spaces to be distributed to the majority of apartments, avoiding a more standard repetitive facade expression. The building concept design has proven an enduring and robust strategy, permitting design changes to the apartment layouts by adjusting balcony, entrance and skybox positions, always as a careful composition, but without compromising the integrity of the overall design.