Northeastern University - Devon House

Opening Northeastern's first campus outside of North America, our mission was to create a diverse and inclusive campus facility that reinforces and promotes a global mindset of international collaboration and experiential learning. The concept of integrating a large American University into an older traditional English college style campus presented a huge design opportunity.

Our task was to create a campus offering multi flexible learning spaces like no other in their portfolio, one that gave maximum flexibility for the students and staff. Once Devon House in St. Katharine Docks was selected as the preferred option, we worked hard not only to space plan the building, but also to help with the complex planning application process of obtaining a Change of Use to educational.

We created a brand new entrance to separate the students from the other users of the building. To contend with the developing Covid-19 situation we completely redesigned the existing ventilation system to allow for two air changes per hour.

To integrate the student journey from ground to first floor was an exciting challenge and the only way of doing this was to design, manufacture and install a brand new feature staircase between the floors.

The bespoke staircase is a central feature with additional biophilia, a curved seating area which links into a specialist bleacher stadium seating joinery piece which creates height within the main Presentation Area.

The campus needed to be completely flexible allowing for unobstructed collaborative learning. We met this challenge by creating agile spaces throughout the campus. The use of sliding and folding glass walls in addition to multi-use writable surfaces throughout,  provides the transparency and flexibility they desired.

We are immensely proud that our project was awarded the 2023 Project of the Year: Public Sector & Cultural Interiors at the prestigious commercial design awards, Mixology23.