Cottrell + Vermeulen Architecture has designed new, bright and airy postgraduate accommodation for Churchill College, Cambridge with interiors featuring Junckers’ solid maple flooring. Cottrell + Vermeulen won a competition to design the new buildings, 16 years after the studio completed a housing scheme on a neighbouring site.
The 35 new units of accommodation comprise five studio flats and 30 en suite rooms with spacious communal areas on each floor, spread across three buildings. The design builds on the original architectural scheme, designed as an extension to CVA’s previous work on the site. The architects sought to recreate the warmth and brightness of the original college rooms from the 1960s and found Junckers maple flooring a good match.
The choice of two-strip boards, where two staves of wood make up one floorboard, was also a reference to the narrow boards used in the original rooms. The naturally pale tone of the maple floor is matched by joinery in birch faced plywood to form a comfortable and welcoming space, ready for students to move at the start of the new academic year. The flooring contractor was Hutchison Flooring.