217 Harrow Road is a joint venture between St Mungo’s Community Housing Association and Stories, a socially responsible developer.
The project will replace an existing west London St Mungo’s centre with a new nine-storey facility that will include 45 self-contained en-suite rooms and 11 further “move-on” units where people will be supported for their next steps. The project also includes a 20-storey residential tower of 98 build-to-rent flats 14 of which will be affordable.
The two related but distinct housing forms are built around a shared landscaped courtyard and framed by much enhanced facades that address the busy Harrow Road and the lively sports courts beneath the Westway. A single architectural identity unites the two uses, with a simple warm brick palette and robust concrete details accentuating the building form. A pigmented concrete plinth is introduced to the base of the building to ground the architecture and create a more robust edge to the hard urban street frontage. The pigmented concrete steps up to wrap entrance doorways and courtyard passageways.
The stepped plan, developed through analysis of aspect and privacy for habitable rooms, generates massing that is then sculpted into multiple slender vertical elements to optimise daylighting. Deep splayed window apertures reveal well-lit interiors and welcoming, non-institutional rooms designed to a high specification in accordance with the St Mungo’s Psychologically Informed Environments Design Guide.
