Stand on the Broad Walk in Regent's Park on a summer evening and the thing that stays with you is not a building. It is the trees. The long avenues of London plane and horse chestnut, the canopy closing overhead, the green going soft as the light drops. John Nash laid the park out two hundred years ago around exactly this, the idea that a piece of the countryside could sit in the middle of the city and that people would be the better for it.
A while ago a client asked us a question worth sitting with. If you were to put a padel court on the edge of all that green, looking straight into it, what would it want to be? Not a court that happens to have a view, but one designed around the view from the first line. They asked us to draw it up so they could see how it might feel. What follows is that concept.
A covered padel court framed around the park beyond, where a full-height glazed wall puts a mature chestnut tree at the centre of the room and a warm timber roof carries the light.
The starting move is the simplest one. The far end of the court is a single full-height glazed wall, a steel grid of glass that frames the park the way a window frames a painting, with one mature chestnut planted right in the middle of the view.
There is an old idea in Japanese garden design called shakkei, borrowed scenery, where you compose a space so that the landscape beyond becomes part of it without ever belonging to you. That is what is happening here. The court owns very little. The park lends it everything: the canopy, the avenues running off into the distance, the changing colour through the seasons. On a still day the glass dissolves and you are playing into the green. That borrowed view is the whole point, and it costs the design nothing to keep.
Above the court is the part that does the heavy lifting in atmosphere. A roof of exposed timber beams, glulam laid across the span, with a warm boarded soffit and slim linear lights tucked between. Timber was the right answer for a few reasons at once. It reads as warm rather than industrial, it brings the colour of the trees indoors, and it lets the structure stay honest and on show rather than hidden behind a flat ceiling.
The side walls are a pale woven mesh, the enclosure a padel court needs to keep the ball in play, here treated as something light and almost textile rather than a hard cage. Daylight passes through it, the columns read as a quiet rhythm, and the room stays open to the air at the edges. The effect is a space that feels held rather than sealed. Tough enough for sport, warm enough that you would happily sit in it long after the game is over.
Padel suits this idea well. A court is twenty metres by ten, a fraction of the footprint of tennis, fast and sociable and easy to pick up, with glass and mesh that keep the ball alive and the rallies long. The playing surface is a deep green that answers the canopy outside, so the eye moves from court to lawn to tree without a jolt. The white line and the net are the only hard geometry in the room. Everything else is timber, mesh, glass, and whatever the park is doing that day.
The design moves are few and each earns its place:
A good sports building is comfortable in ways nobody notices. Daylight comes in low through the glazed end and filters through the mesh, so the lights stay off for most of the day. The open sides let air move across the court, which keeps it cool through a long rally and clears the closeness that ruins a stuffy indoor space. The timber softens sound rather than bouncing it around. None of this announces itself. It is simply pleasant to be in, which is the only test that matters.
The sustainability runs along the same quiet line we hold on every project. A timber structure stores carbon rather than spending it. Daylight-led design cuts the running energy. The planted edges and the connection to the park's own ecology are good for more than the people playing. We did not bolt any of this on to make a point. A building like this only earns its place if it is light to run and good to use for decades, long after the first photographs.
This is a study, drawn so a client could stand inside the idea and decide whether it was worth chasing. Whether this exact court gets built on this exact edge, or whether the thinking lands somewhere else, the principle holds and it travels. Find the green that is already there, point the architecture straight at it, and build something warm and low and useful in front of it.
The best thing on a site like this was never going to be the building. The most an architect can do is have the sense to step back and let the trees be the room.
Have a site with a view worth designing around? We would love to talk through what it could become. Please do get in touch.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
→ Or call the studio on 020 3947 5886
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