Poundbury

Over two decades now, our practice has designed houses and buildings in Poundbury for the Duchy of Cornwall. Poundbury, the experimental urban extension to Dorchester envisioned by the former Prince of Wales in the 1980s, and masterplanned by Leon Krier, brings to fruition the most significant delivered new urbanist development seen in Europe. Internationally renowned for its creation of mixed-use, walkable streets, with a significant proportion of affordable housing, Poundbury could be considered perhaps the most influential housing project in the United Kingdom since the Second World War.

Our work in Poundbury began in the late 1990s, when, as a student at the Prince’s Institute for Architecture, Ben won a small limited competition to design the first phase of Pummery Square.  Five years later, we designed Woodlands Crescent, and then in 2012 work started on the South East Quadrant.  Since that date, the practice has designed or masterplanned over 1000 houses, including Royal Pavilion which forms the focal point of Krier’s masterplan.

Our experience in Poundbury, working with the Duchy and with Leon Krier, puts us at the heart of the new urbanist planning movement and from here we have gone on to design several other major schemes, including the Tornagrain New Town in the Highlands, South-East Faversham, for the Duchy of Cornwall, in Kent, and Welborne, in Hampshire.  Large scale masterplanning remains a fundamental part of our practice’s work, as it has been from the first, and we love applying the lessons of Poundbury and these other projects on a wider and wider scale – improving the built environment of the British Isles and leaving, hopefully, a powerful legacy over the decades.

South-East Faversham

The Duchy of Cornwall, best known for its pioneering, sustainable developments at Poundbury and at Nansledan, owns a significant landholding to the south of the historic town of Faversham, in Kent.

With Kim Wilkie, with whom we work regularly, we have been masterplanning a new settlement on this site which will create a powerful new vision of what truly sustainable development means today – starting from the earth up.  Kim and our studio have developed a masterplan philosophy around soil, water and local patterns of human relationship with the land.  A network of avenues, orchards, allotments, meadows and wooded rides will link the built form together in a beautiful, gently-gridded plan of tree-lined streets. At the heart of the development is a large public urban square that will contain the Cricket Club.

The masterplan allows for a rich mix of houses, commercial buildings, shops, cafes, schools and other buildings and will contain a significant proportion of affordable housing provision. All buildings have been designed with best practice sustainable performance in mind, both in terms of building fabric, energy use, storage and generation, water consumption and treatment of sewage using highly innovative systems.

We have spent time and great care studying local patterns of development in Faversham and Swale, in order to inform our approach not only to local patterns of landscape development but also to buildings and materials.  As a practice we passionately believe that the best solutions to contemporary problems can often be found using the wisdom of tradition and extremely local building forms, adapted for the best of life today and in the future.

Download the Faversham Characterisation Study.

Royal Pavilion

Royal Pavilion is the focal building in the Duchy of Cornwall’s Poundbury development, masterplanned by Leon Krier.  At the centre of the scheme, Krier envisioned a bold new urban square lined with taller buildings, and, on the northern side – with extensive views over the Dorset countryside, a city-scaled Pavilion with a tall tower at the focus point of several major streets.

Over several years the Duchy has developed ideas for the proposed building; ultimately deciding that it should be a development of luxuriously appointed, beautifully-designed apartments incorporating the tower into the scheme. Ben Pentreath was appointed to design the building in 2012 and planning was obtained in 2014. The square, lined on other sides with buildings designed by Quinlan and Francis Terry, was opened by H.M. The Queen in 2016 and Royal Pavilion opened in 2018.

The building is designed with echoes of architecture by John Nash, and Sir John Soane, combining Greek Revival forms and details with Roman arcaded architecture. The tower rests on a giant arched base in reconstructed stone. The building is of brick with restrained classical detailing. Every apartment is designed with extensive outdoor terraces and as a result the building has a series of colonnades on each elevation. The interiors have been designed by Ben Pentreath and can be viewed here.