Nine Elms Park is a mixed-use development with market-sale and affordable apartments above ground-floor retail units and community spaces within the rapidly emerging Central London setting of the new American Embassy.

Working alongside architects Allies and Morrison and Morris+Company, we are designing two buildings providing 207 homes within larger urban blocks.

The blocks comprise a family of buildings framing the Linear Park – a unique urban parkland stretching from Vauxhall in the east to Battersea in the west. As a green lung, the park will provide flood resilience, breathing space for recreation, and a key route through the heart of Nine Elms.

Street elevations with a height of up to 15 storeys are considered as tripartite compositions with a base, middle and top defined using a variety of façade treatments evoking the area’s industrial heritage. Although predominantly brick, adjacent buildings are given distinct identities through the use of different colours, articulation, and artful misalignments. Precast concrete features add lightness, depth, and definition.

The design of the buildings expresses apartment layouts optimised for daylighting, orientation, use, and furniture arrangements. For instance, the prominent corner building at Two Nine Elms Park features a rhythmic, repeating zigzag profile on intermediate floors. Their apexes feature corner bay windows offering views of the River Thames, with recessed balconies in between providing sheltered external spaces accessed from both the living area and bedroom of each apartment.

In an area that is undergoing dramatic renewal, our design intent is for a timeless synthesis of form and function, from the scale of a city to that of an individual home.