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by Imran Jahn on Jul 31, 2025
Reimagining the Elmwood Lawn Tennis Club Pavilion
A few streets from our Lexi Cinema project in Kensal Rise, hidden behind hedgerows and the back gardens of family homes, Elmwood Lawn Tennis Club
has quietly served its community for more than seventy years. It is the sort of place you only know if someone brings you there.
In early 2024, we were invited to take part in a closed competition to design a new clubhouse. It was one of the clearest briefs we’ve received in years. Not because it was ambitious in architectural terms, but because the club understood precisely 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 within its garden setting while supporting the social life of the club throughout the year.
What Elmwood wanted was not a statement building. They were explicit about that from the outset.
They wanted something calm. Something practical. Something that belonged naturally within the landscape of the club and the rhythm of its use. A building that felt as though it had always been there.
That is a far more demanding brief than architecture often admits. Buildings that feel inevitable are much harder to design than buildings that seek attention.
Starting with What Already Existed
Rather than erase the existing pavilion entirely, we began by studying its character. The modest gabled rooflines, exposed steel trusses, and even the vaulted form of the substation on the site became important reference points in the design process.
The proposal does not imitate these elements directly. It reinterprets them carefully, allowing the new building to feel continuous with the club’s history rather than detached from it.
The landscape shaped the architecture equally.
A tennis club is fundamentally an outdoor place. Much of its life happens between matches, beside courts, under trees, and around edges. The pavilion needed to feel less like an object in a garden and more like part of the garden itself.
Large openings connect the main club room to the south-facing terrace. Covered external areas provide shelter throughout the year. New planting softens the threshold between building and landscape so the architecture settles quietly into its surroundings.
A Pavilion Designed Around Everyday Use
At the centre of the building is a flexible club room capable of hosting everything from coaching sessions and committee meetings to finals gatherings and community events. Large sliding openings allow activity to spill naturally onto the terrace during warmer months, while movable partitions allow the space to contract when needed.
A café and licensed bar form the social heart of the pavilion, supported by a domestic-scale kitchen designed for everyday practicality rather than commercial excess.
The remaining accommodation includes generous changing facilities, accessible amenities, secure storage, administrative space, and dedicated areas for coaching and equipment maintenance. Technology, AV integration, and access control systems are incorporated quietly into the fabric of the building rather than celebrated as features in themselves.
The intention throughout was straightforward: create a building that works exceptionally well without ever feeling overdesigned.
Life Beyond the Building
The outdoor spaces were treated with the same seriousness as the architecture itself.
New seating terraces encourage the simple social ritual of watching tennis from the edge of the court. Covered areas and integrated heating extend the use of the club through colder months and wetter weather. A hitting wall, fold-away table tennis, outdoor cooking facilities, and safe children’s play areas allow the life of the club to extend beyond formal matches and coaching sessions.
Cycle storage, servicing, and maintenance areas are integrated carefully into the wider landscape so utility never overwhelms the character of the setting.
Sustainability as Common Sense
At RISE, low-energy design is not an additional layer applied once the architecture is complete. It shapes the project from the very beginning.
The Elmwood pavilion was conceived as a long-term community asset: durable, efficient, comfortable, and inexpensive to run. High levels of insulation, careful airtightness detailing, passive solar control, cross ventilation, solar PVs, low-energy heating systems, and responsibly sourced materials all work quietly in the background to reduce operational demand while improving everyday comfort.
None of this was approached as technological theatre.
A building used across winter mornings, summer tournaments, evening events, and children’s coaching sessions simply needs to perform well. Sustainability, in that sense, becomes less an aspiration and more a basic standard of care.
What Projects Like This Are Really About
Elmwood is where children learn to serve for the first time. Where matches drift into conversations long after the courts have emptied. Where a neighbourhood quietly maintains part of its social fabric through repetition, familiarity, and shared routine.
The role of the building is not to compete with any of that.
Its role is simply to support it generously and without friction.
The hope is that, over time, the pavilion becomes almost unremarkable in the best possible sense: familiar, useful, well-used, and completely embedded within the life of the club.
Architecture rarely needs to shout to matter.
Building for the Future
Community buildings earn their place slowly. Through daily use. Through reliability. Through the accumulation of ordinary moments over many years.
The new Elmwood pavilion was designed with that in mind: to age gracefully, sit quietly within its garden setting, and serve its members for decades without demanding attention it hasn’t earned.
If you’re considering upgrading a community or sports facility and would like to discuss a low-energy, people-centred approach to design, we’d be glad to hear from you.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
→ Or call the studio on 020 3947 5886
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