Yellow Dot Nursery Dowds Farm

The project involved the conversion and extension of a Grade II listed farmhouse to become a children’s day nursery whilst retaining the original building’s historic fabric.

The farmhouse, part seventeenth and part nineteenth century, had been derelict for more than 10 years and had been extensively vandalised with few period fittings remaining. The surrounding land had been redeveloped as a housing estate whilst the building at the heart of the farm remained empty, clad in a temporary scaffold with a metal sheet roof and concrete buttresses to prevent the building collapsing.

The first task was to stabilise the existing building, underpin the walls and replace damaged structure. The majority of the seventeenth century external walls were rebuilt brick by brick using the original masonry and once the wall linings and ceilings were removed, the original seventeenth century timber frame was revealed for the first time in hundreds of years. The timbers were repaired, cleaned, preserved and exposed so their beauty can be appreciated.

New extensions, clad in black zinc, replaced poor quality nineteenth and twentieth century additions and complement the existing brickwork by making reference to the farming history.

The different ages of building results in a Nursery with variety in its’ spaces, from the cosy and vernacular seventeenth century, through grand and spacious nineteenth century to the more precise and angular modern extensions.

Cookie	Name	Purpose
Google Analytics	_utma _utmb _utmc _utmz	These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited. To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
ASPSESSIONID#		HTTP Session: Preserves users states across page requests.