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Grands Vaux Court Jersey

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Grands Vaux Court, St Helier, Jersey

Deservedly winning a ‘Highly Commended’ accolade in the Jersey Design Awards 2022 ‘Best Large-Scale New Build’ development, is Grands Vaux Court, providing 123 new social-rental flats in an impressive scheme involving the redevelopment of the former Troy Court estate in St Helier.

This major development, undertaken for Les Vaux Housing Trust, was designed by Michael Bravery Chartered Architect, with ROK Construction as main contractors. Structural engineers were Rothwells Ltd and quantity surveyors were Woodward Burton Associates.

The flats are in a mix of 1, 2 & 3 bedroom units, complete with associated landscaping and facilities. The scheme was required to be built in two phases over a period of 5 years, to enable the long-standing tenants of Troy Court to remain on site during the building works.

The existing site was already densely developed, and the brief presented the challenge of providing more accommodation, more parking and more useable green space, whilst also presenting a smaller scale appearance to the roadside. The site was further constrained by the presence of a storm water culvert running through the centre, which could not be moved or built over.

Michael Bravery commented: “The above factors led us to design the new buildings in the form of two narrow ‘ribbons’ along the west and east site boundaries, with open space between – which enabled all flats to enjoy good sunlight at various times of the day. Parking was in perpendicular strips within gaps between the buildings, so that the areas directly in front of the buildings contained only landscaped gardens.

“We wanted the development to have a small-scale sociable feel. To achieve this, we planned the accommodation as a series of linked 4-storey town houses, which presented the appearance of terraced housing to the road.

“This plan form allowed us to ‘step’ the buildings in and out, so that they followed the irregular boundaries of the site and thus echoed the physical shape of the valley itself.  We gave the access road through the site a meandering serpentine shape to break up the rectilinear nature of the design and also to suggest the idea of a stream flowing through the site, perhaps as may have originally existed before it was developed.”

He added that reference to the site’s original nature as a wetlands area along the base of a steep wooded valley inspired a theme influencing the design of other decorative aspects of the buildings, such as the balcony glazing, mosaic entrance panels, roadside gates and playground design.

The glass guardings of the balconies are screen printed with a series of designs prepared by local artist Kerry-Jane Warner, based on the idea of a flowing stream with weeds and pond life.

This theme was continued and developed in a series of nine mosaic panels outside each of the flat entrances. Kerry-Jane prepared semi-abstract digital sketches for these panels which are intended to loosely represent the course of a waterway from clear, fast-running water near its source to slacker water with muddy banks and weeds further downstream.

These designs were converted into small sections of pre-assembled mosaic tiles by a specialist firm in Boston USA called ‘Artaic’, using an innovative robotic process, and they were then installed in their correct sequence on site to create the finished design.

Michael Bravery said: “The safety flooring for the playground offered another opportunity to incorporate art and we developed a design intended to evoke the idea of a pond with ripples and ‘landing spots’ coordinated with the layout of the play equipment.”

A series of custom designed pedestrian access gates were also installed along the main valley road. These were fabricated in polished stainless steel incorporating laser-cut infill panels with designs based upon stylised silhouettes of trees to reflect and further reinforce the site’s heavily wooded setting.

For the buildings themselves, external materials were selected with low future maintenance in mind. In particular, brick was used up to first floor level for this reason, as well as to give a softer ‘rustic’ feel to the scheme that would sit comfortably within the existing landscape setting, in contrast to the crisp detailing of the metal cladding above.
The development also won a further special award for ‘Best Artwork in the Public Domain’.

Grands Vaux Court

Grands Vaux Court

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