Adam Richards Architects Pairs CLT with Limestone Brick for a School Wellbeing Center in East Sussex

School health facilities rarely get their own architectural identity. They tend to be rooms within larger buildings, or worse, portacabins. At Mayfield School, a Catholic boarding and day school for over 350 girls in East Sussex, Adam Richards Architects has done something far more deliberate: a purpose-built, 277 square meter pavilion that integrates medical treatment, counselling, and teaching under one roof. St Raphael's Health and Wellbeing Center replaces temporary structures and parking with a building that takes its program seriously enough to give it architectural weight.

What makes the project genuinely noteworthy is its material strategy. It is reportedly the first completed building in the world to combine a cross-laminated timber structural system with natural limestone brick masonry walls, developed in collaboration with Polycor using a new stone brick product. The result is a building with low embodied carbon that also reads as solid, domestic, and warm. That combination of structural innovation and atmospheric restraint is the real story here.

A Long Wall and a Courtyard

The building occupies a pivotal position in the campus masterplan that Adam Richards Architects has developed for Mayfield since 2019. To the north, a long pale wall, what the practice calls a "city wall," gathers the existing school buildings on the hill and defines a clear boundary to the wider landscape. It faces the cricket pitch with a series of vertical slit openings, deliberately fortress-like but never hostile. The effect from the playing fields is of a low, confident horizon line that completes the campus edge.

To the south, the building creates a new courtyard, a sheltered garden that becomes the social and environmental heart of the plan. The aerial views reveal how the curved footprint negotiates between the school's historic brick buildings and the open sports grounds, stitching a previously fragmented edge of the campus into a legible whole.

Limestone Brick and the Question of Permanence

The limestone brick deserves close attention. It is not cladding in the decorative sense. The masonry outer wall is structural in its contribution to the building's environmental performance, and the stone itself is reusable at end of life, a genuine circular material choice. The pale, creamy tone reads as both contemporary and ancient, sitting comfortably beside the medieval palace and Victorian school buildings that define Mayfield's historic core.

Detail shots reveal how the brickwork is handled with care: deep vertical recesses create shadow and rhythm along the north wall, while the south facade opens up generously with glazing framed by the same pale stone. Purple alliums planted at the base soften the threshold between ground and wall. It is the kind of planting choice that signals a domestic scale, not an institutional one.

The Cloister Corridor

A long glazed timber corridor runs the length of the south side, parallel to the courtyard. It functions as the building's circulatory spine, connecting every room while offering continuous views of the garden and sky. The arched timber structure and clerestory lighting give this corridor a distinctly cloister-like quality, appropriate for a school with deep Catholic roots and a campus centered on a restored medieval palace.

The corridor is not merely functional. With its vaulted ceiling, natural light, and generous width, it becomes a place to pause. A yellow chair sits beside a window in one image, a quiet signal that the building's designers understand the difference between circulation and inhabitation.

Domestic Scale, Institutional Program

The interior takes cues from domestic settings with striking conviction. The central kitchen and dining space, which doubles as an informal classroom for health and wellbeing lessons, features exposed CLT beams, a long communal table, and full-height glazed doors to the courtyard. It reads as a farmhouse kitchen, not a school canteen. Curved built-in benches with pale timber walls and a circular pendant light reinforce the sense of a room designed for comfort rather than efficiency.

This deliberate domesticity serves a real therapeutic purpose. Students arriving for medical treatment or counselling encounter a building that does not feel clinical. The soft daylight, natural materials, and proportioned rooms all work toward reducing anxiety before any conversation begins.

Private Rooms and Soft Light

The plan balances openness with privacy. Treatment and counselling rooms are positioned along the edges, each connected to light, air, and garden views. A bedroom with full-height glazing and ochre curtains overlooks the planted courtyard, framed by CLT beams. A treatment room features a curved white ceiling and soft ambient light, closer to a spa than a nurse's office. Even the workspaces get considered details: a circular window and curved ceiling create a focused, calm atmosphere.

These are not luxury gestures. They are strategic design decisions for a building whose users are often vulnerable. The quality of light and enclosure in these rooms communicates care more effectively than any signage or branding could.

Courtyard as Garden Room

The south courtyard operates as an outdoor room, enclosed by the building's curving walls and planted with young trees and low beds. At dusk, the perforated limestone wall glows with a delicate patterned light, turning the boundary into something closer to a lantern. Window seats look out to this shared garden, reinforcing the plan's commitment to connecting every space with the outdoors.

The courtyard also performs a practical role in the building's passive design strategy. South-facing glazing captures solar gain in winter while shading devices manage overheating in summer. Combined with air-source heat pumps, MVHR, and a fully electric energy system, the building achieves its environmental targets without sacrificing architectural ambition.

Campus Context

Mayfield's campus is defined by its stone chapel, pitched-roof buildings, and the restored medieval palace at its heart. St Raphael's does not compete with these structures. Its single-storey profile and corrugated barrel-vault roof defer to the skyline while asserting a contemporary presence at the campus edge. The recessed entrance, framed in cast concrete and dark metal, is one of the building's few overtly modern gestures, a deliberate threshold that signals arrival without grandstanding.

As the first realized element of a wider masterplan, the building also rationalizes access: a level, wheelchair-accessible entry replaces previously difficult routes, pedestrian circulation is clarified, and direct ambulance access is maintained alongside proximity to the sports pitches. These are infrastructure moves disguised as architecture, which is often the best kind.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals the building's curved footprint and its negotiation between the school's existing fabric and the open landscape. The floor plan shows the elongated, gently curving layout with rooms distributed along both edges of the central corridor, a strategy that maximizes perimeter for natural light and ventilation. Sections confirm the low-profile strategy: clerestory openings bring light deep into the plan, while the barrel-vault roof keeps the building below the sightline of the campus's taller historic structures.

Why This Project Matters

St Raphael's matters because it demonstrates that small institutional buildings, the ones that typically receive the least design attention, can carry significant architectural ideas. A 277 square meter health center at a school would normally be a functional afterthought. Here it becomes a testing ground for a new material system, a model for low-carbon construction, and a case study in how architecture can support mental and physical wellbeing through spatial quality rather than technology.

The pairing of CLT with natural limestone brick is the project's headline innovation, but its real contribution is atmospheric. Adam Richards Architects has created a building that feels like it belongs, both to its campus and to the tradition of English institutional architecture, while quietly pushing forward the conversation about what school buildings can be. At £2.3 million, it is not cheap per square meter, but the value it delivers in student welfare, campus coherence, and material research is difficult to quantify and harder to argue against.

St Raphael's Health and Wellbeing Center by Adam Richards Architects. Located at Mayfield School, East Sussex, United Kingdom. 277 m². Completed 2024. Structural engineer: Price & Myers. MEP and acoustics: Max Fordham. Photography by Brotherton Lock and Lorenzo Zandri.

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