Tennis in an English garden: reimagining the Elmwood pavilion

A few streets from our Lexi Cinema project in Kensal Rise, behind hedges and the back gardens of family homes, Elmwood Lawn Tennis Club has quietly served its members for more than seventy years. It's the kind of place you only find if someone takes you there.

In early 2024 we were invited into a closed competition to design a new clubhouse. It was one of the clearest briefs we've had in years, not because it was architecturally ambitious, but because the club knew exactly what it valued and what it didn't.

A new low-energy pavilion for Elmwood Lawn Tennis Club in Kensal Rise, designed to sit quietly in its garden setting and support the life of the club through the year. RISE Design Studio.

What Elmwood wanted was not a statement building, and they said so plainly from the start. They wanted something calm, practical, and at home in its setting, a building that felt as though it had always been there. That's a harder brief than architecture usually admits. A building that feels inevitable takes more work than one that asks to be noticed.

Starting with what was already there

Rather than wipe the existing pavilion away, we started by studying it. The modest gabled rooflines, the exposed steel trusses, even the vaulted form of the substation on the site, all became reference points. The new design doesn't copy them, but it reinterprets them, so the building reads as continuous with the club's history rather than cut off from it.

The grounds shaped the design just as much. A tennis club is really an outdoor place, and most of its life happens between matches: beside the courts, under the trees, around the edges. So the pavilion needed to feel less like an object set in a garden and more like part of the garden. Large openings link the main club room to the south-facing terrace, covered areas give shelter through the year, and new planting softens the line between building and garden so it settles into its surroundings.

A building organised around everyday use

At the centre is a flexible club room that can take everything from coaching and committee meetings to finals-day gatherings and community events. Large sliding doors let it open onto the terrace in warmer months, and movable partitions let it shrink when it doesn't need to be at full size. A café and licensed bar form the social heart of the building, with a domestic-scale kitchen built for everyday use rather than commercial show.

The rest of the accommodation covers generous changing facilities, accessible amenities, secure storage, a little administrative space, and dedicated areas for coaching and equipment. The technology, AV and access control are built quietly into the building rather than made into features. The aim throughout was a building that works very well without ever feeling overdesigned.

Life beyond the building

The outdoor spaces had the same attention as the building itself. New seating terraces make room for the simple ritual of watching tennis from the edge of a court. Covered areas and a bit of integrated heating extend the club's use into colder, wetter months. A hitting wall, fold-away table tennis, outdoor cooking and a safe children's play area let the life of the club run well beyond formal matches and coaching. Cycle storage, servicing and maintenance are worked into the grounds so the practical things never take over the setting.

Sustainability as common sense

We don't treat low-energy design as a layer added once the architecture is done. It shapes the project from the start. The pavilion was conceived as a long-term community asset: durable, efficient, comfortable and cheap to run. Good insulation, careful airtightness, passive solar control, cross ventilation, solar PV, low-energy heating and responsibly sourced materials all work in the background to cut the running demand and improve day-to-day comfort.

None of it is technological theatre. A building used on winter mornings, through summer tournaments, at evening events and for children's coaching simply needs to perform. In that context sustainability isn't an aspiration, it's a basic standard of care.

What a project like this is really about

Elmwood is where children learn to serve for the first time, where matches drift into conversation long after the courts have emptied, where a neighbourhood keeps part of its social life going through repetition and familiarity. The building's job isn't to compete with any of that. It's to support it, generously and without getting in the way.

The hope is that over time the pavilion becomes almost unremarkable, in the best sense: familiar, useful, well used, and completely part of the life of the club. A community building earns its place slowly, through daily use and reliability and the accumulation of ordinary moments over years. This one was designed to age well, sit quietly in its garden, and serve its members for decades without asking for attention it hasn't earned.

If you're thinking about upgrading a community or sports building and want a low-energy, people-first approach, we'd be glad to talk it through.

→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
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