Portland Apartments

A bijou block of luxury flats in Summertown, north Oxford.

The building is designed to mediate between the stately stone barn of the adjacent church hall on one side and the more piecemeal domestic mix on the other.

So it shares a material palette and simplicity of detail with the former, but the form is broken up into interlocking volumes to relate to the latter.

The linked blocks, the deep reveals, the stepped walls and proto-portico framing the generous balconies all work together to imbue the building with a hewn sculptural quality and a nobility which belies its size.