Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club commissioned Wincer Kievenaar Architects to design a new clubhouse to help sustain the club into the future by providing a new functional, attractive and efficient facility overlooking the course, and to provide new public access to help make golf more accessible. A landscape led approach was taken to the design at the edge of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the proposal incorporates a low pitched intensive green roof and gabion stone cladding. A public cafe, putting green, toilets and information viewing platform are proposed for public use. New contemporary dwellings, provided in order to help fund the scheme, are secluded along the road side and step down the hillside to shield them from long distance views.
“[the design] manages to achieve a dual effect whereby it will clearly be read as a local landmark by virtue of its scale and bold, attractive design whilst also mitigating its scale such that its impact will not be over-dominant in bulk or mass. This duality is difficult to achieve but has been managed here with a high degree of refinement and sensitivity to context. I think that the designer has understood well that the building should not be eye-catching because it is large and imposing but can be by virtue of the high quality of its design.
“The design acknowledges and expresses that it has many faces and many uses – both public and private – with aspects out onto the adjacent public car park, the cliff top, the promenade, the golf course, Cliff Road and its dwellings and key long views from Felixstowe Ferry and Golf Road. Only a contemporary architectural approach has been able to resolve these external constraints and demands (and also the internal programmatic ones) through a language of aggregated forms, varied materials and combination swept roofs (which, incidentally, create an appealing ‘fifth’ elevation – the roofscape). These all respond to the differing edge conditions of the building but are unified through the use of extensive areas of glazing which also dramatise the design (by day and by night).”
Robert Scrimgeour Principal Design and Conservation Officer, East Suffolk Council
Planning has been granted by East Suffolk District Council in May 2020 – Link to East Suffolk Council Planning Page