The Maypole cafe in the finished home, and our own photograph of it. The rooms that make a care home worth living in are also the ones that take the longest to get right on site.
The full story
A care home earns its value twice over: once when a scheme wins the consent that lets it be built at the right scale, and again when that consent becomes an open, registered building running on programme. Kingsley Healthcare appointed us to do both on Turweston Road, Brackley. We designed the home from the operator's brief, secured its planning consent, and delivered it through construction to handover, one practice from the first sketch to the finished building.
The plot sits inside a wider care campus on the edge of Brackley, a primary-care allocation alongside a GP surgery, a pharmacy and a cottage hospital, within a larger development of superstore, hotel, office and industrial uses. The brief was a two-storey home of single bedroom suites with the full clinical, communal and back-of-house provision a modern nursing environment needs.
A care home is one of the harder building types to deliver. It carries the clinical and fire-safety expectations of a healthcare facility, the comfort and finish of hospitality, and the round-the-clock operational discipline of a residential setting, all under a consent loaded with conditions. Brackley added a difficult site on top: the ground falls noticeably from one side of the plot to the other, so level changes, retaining and foundations beside a piled boundary had to be resolved before a brick could be laid, and existing services and easements ran along the boundaries.
We took the scheme through planning, including the Section 73 approval that lifted the home from 62 beds to 66 with revised elevations and additional parking. That is revenue-generating capacity secured at the design stage rather than argued for later, and it is the clearest illustration of the first half of the value.
Then we produced the full construction information: setting out, drainage, floor plans, elevations, external works and the level-driven retaining, and coordinated the structural, civil and drainage engineers, the building-services designers, the approved inspector and a long list of specialist subcontractors and suppliers around one buildable design.
We led the discharge of the conditions, keeping a live tracker and submitting each in turn. By the end of 2020 substantially every one had been formally discharged: surface-water drainage and its verification, contamination validation, landscaping, lighting, cycle parking, fire hydrants, archaeology, a construction traffic plan, and a materials regime that required a one-metre limestone sample panel to be built and approved on site before the walls could go up. The landscape obligations closed out into 2021, by which time the local authority itself had reorganised.
The finished palette came off the approved schedule and was drawn from the medical buildings next door so the home would sit inside the campus: silicone render, natural limestone in random courses with lime mortar to the entrance, salon and GP room, red stock brick, Siberian larch to the window surrounds, grey fibre-cement panels to the recessed bays, dark anthracite aluminium windows, a slate-grey single-ply roof and a sedum roof over the plant and laundry.
Throughout construction we administered the contract for the client, issuing regular architect's reports, inspecting progress and resolving the detail a complex care environment throws up, from fire protection to exposed structure to the commercial kitchen and laundry, alongside main contractor Deeley, and through the COVID-19 pandemic. The value to the operator was the continuity. One practice held the scheme from the first sketch to handover, so the commercial intent set at design stage, the 66-bed consent, the efficient plan, the buildable detail, survived all the way into the finished building.
