Bath-based developer Kersfield has been granted planning permission to transform the main campus of a former school in Bristol into 44 luxury homes.
The plans, approved by Bristol City Council, include sympathetically restoring the Grade II* listed Redland Court at the city’s former Redland High School.
Kersfield will also remove the 1960s sports hall and east wing, replacing them with a new development designed to be complimentary to Redland Court while providing the opportunity to reinstate the historic landscaping to the front of the building.
The new homes, which will range from one-bedroom apartments to four-bedroom family houses, will be finished to a high-quality, in line with previous Kersfield developments.
Built in 1732-1735, Redland Court was owned by several Bristol merchants and bankers before being sold to Redland High School in 1885.
The site became available after the school announced plans to merge with Redmaids’ School to create Redmaids’ High School, which has been based on Redmaids’ existing site in Westbury on Trym since September 2017.
Kersfield development manager Alex Feilden-Cook said: “After 130 years as a school, we’re delighted to be going ahead with plans to restore the Redland High School site for residential use once more – ensuring Redland Court is protected into the future.
“We are very proud and excited by the mix and variety of units we have planned across the site, ranging in style from a Georgian Palladian garden apartment to modern three-storey townhouses. In addition to making a financial contribution for the development of further affordable housing elsewhere in the city, we listened to feedback from councillors and amended the proposals to include five shared-ownership homes in the Victorian former art building.”
Kersfield adopted a design philosophy for Redland Court to return the main house to how it was originally designed and built, working on the project with a team of skilled designers and consultants on the project, including Bath and Bristol architects The Nash Partnership and Bristol-based AWW Architects.
Mr Feilden-Cook added: “We have carried this philosophy throughout the scheme, staying true to the original character and intervening with a modern design touch where appropriate.”
Kersfield’s recent developments in Bristol include the transformation of the historic Burwalls House next to the Clifton Suspension Bridge into a collection of stunning apartments and houses.
Among its Bath projects has been the transformation of obsolete city centre office space into luxury holiday and short-term let apartments as well as the development of a prime four-acre former MoD site in Lansdown with 26 four and five-bedroom houses and nine large apartments, the former Hope Chapel, which is being converted into eight apartments, a house and a ground floor retail/restaurant space, and four large apartments at Beckford Gate, also in Lansdown.
