We have been appointed to design a new pavilion for Sutton Churches Tennis Club, and it is exactly the kind of project we most like to take on: modest in scale, serious in intent, and rooted in a community.
It began, as these things do, with the sense that the old pavilion, well used and much loved as it was, had reached the end of its useful life. The club had outgrown it, not only in numbers but in what it wanted the building to be. This was never about grandeur or trends, or even, entirely, about tennis. It was about making a place that serves the club's people, now and for the next generation of members.
The existing timber-clad pavilion at Sutton Churches Tennis Club, a well-worn home ready for renewal. The new building will keep what the club values while performing far better. RISE Design Studio.
The brief that emerged is a practical one, and all the better for it. The club wants a building that is generous and easy to be in: open, light-filled and warm in every sense. One that works as well for Finals Day and Christmas drinks as it does for a midweek coaching session or a five-minute shelter from the rain. It should feel as though it has always been there, while being unmistakably of now.
A lot of the brief is in the ordinary details that make a building work. A main room where fifty people can gather, or three, with doors that open wide onto the courts on a warm day and close up tight and secure at night, with no padlocks and no fuss. Changing rooms you can reach without walking through the middle of a social. Somewhere comfortable to change a baby. Cleanable floors, lockable cupboards, a cold and reliable fridge. A loo you can reach from outside without coming through the main room, and a drinking fountain that isn't jammed in a corner. A home for the garden chairs when they aren't in use, parking for bikes, somewhere to compost and to sort waste. Solar panels doing their job on the roof and a heat pump working quietly in the background, and floodlight controls you can actually find.
And a proper place for the club's history, the plaques, the photographs, the stories. Not a museum or a shrine, just a nod and a thank you.
Running through all of it is a simple performance brief: keep the heat in through the winter, let it out through the summer, and ask as little of the planet as possible while doing so. And build it once, well enough that it doesn't need constant patching and rethinking. For a volunteer-run club, a building that is cheap to run and undemanding to maintain isn't a luxury, it is the whole point.
The club's motto is Community, Companionship, Competition, and the real test of the design is whether you can feel those things in the building itself, in the brickwork and the joinery, rather than only read them on a wall.
We have started drawing, but more than that we have started listening, because that is what a project like this needs. A good community building is decided in the details that are easy to overlook: where people come in, where they hang a coat, where they stop to say hello, the thresholds, the views, the natural light, the feel of timber under your hand, the way a roof overhang makes you feel looked after.
So we are working through the practical questions with the club: where people will gather and where they will stand to applaud, how to make the building work for everyone regardless of age, mobility or background, and how to make it secure without feeling like a fortress. Useful, but welcoming with it.
This isn't a big, glossy project, and it won't turn up in the weekend supplements. That is exactly why it matters. Community buildings like this, when they are done well, change how people feel about where they live. They give a place some pride and let things happen. They don't need to be large. They need to be right.
From here the real work begins. We will test layouts and weigh a raised approach against a lowered one, plan flush thresholds and covered outdoor seating, and talk to the club about acoustics, storage and the right number of loos. We will look at how the building performs in the heat of July and the frost of January, and find proper homes for the plant room, the floodlight meters, the mop cupboards and the honour boards. The unglamorous things are half of what makes a building work.
We will bring in a quantity surveyor from the early stages so the budget supports the design rather than fighting it, and we will develop three distinct options, so the club can pursue funding and make the right long-term decisions with a clear view of the choices.
It might, in the end, just be a building. But for this club it will be the place where matches are played, tea is poured, old friends meet and new friendships start. That is worth getting right.
If you are thinking about a new or reworked community building of your own, we'd be glad to talk it through.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
→ Or call the studio on 020 3947 5886
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