A new piece of townscape arranged around parkland and centred on the restored Priory Hall.
Hallmark Developments provides specialist retirement accommodation, offering socially supportive stimulating environments in which elderly people can live independently. The brief was to restore and preserve the old Priory Hall and associated buildings, while providing new accommodation for the elderly, responding positively to the historic and landscape setting and wider context.
Priory Hall provides a range of accommodation catering for the needs of retired and more elderly residents. Wheelchair standard individual cottages sit alongside 54 1 and 2 bedroom retirement apartments and a 3 storey 70 bed care home. A historic school building has been restored to provide communal facilities including lounges and social spaces, along with some characterful sheltered apartments, while a former schoolmasters house becomes an accessible dwelling. All of this is set within newly landscaped grounds providing a mix of private and shared gardens and open parkland.
Priory Hall provides a range of accommodation catering for the needs of retired and more elderly residents.
The historic Priory Hall has a formal Victorian style with strong gables and chimney forms, while the schoolmasters house has arts and crafts period references and detailing. The old buildings retained positive historical associations and their restoration was a positive contribution to the local community.
The development works around several high quality individual trees on the site, creating focal points and landscape features, while clusters of trees around the edge of the site provide a verdant backdrop to the houses and care home.
The proposals create a new piece of townscape arranged around parkland fronting the street and centred on the retained Priory Hall and school master’s house. A crescent of terraced houses and flats wraps around one side of the park, with varied style and heights, while in the northern part of the site a series of courts and greens are contained by the care home and sheltered block.
The end result is a development that has its own distinct architectural language.
The design was refined through engagement with the local community and with the Essex County Council Urban Design team, who felt that the original designs were too rich with too many design references from the architecture of the town. The end result is a development that has its own distinct architectural language drawn more from the original school buildings on the site than the town itself.
The end result is an attractive urban realm with dwellings facing onto a variety of streets and parklands. A high density of accommodation is well integrated into he landscape and contributes to the development of Halstead without harming the quality of the town.
