What we delivered
- Layout optimisation
- Interior design
- Amenity & communal areas
- Development branding
- Logo design
- Brochure design
- Website
- Show home
- Marketing suite
The project
Studio, one and two-bedroom apartments on Vastern Road in central Reading, converted from Great Brigham’s Mead — the former Three UK headquarters. A commercial building turned residential.
The site is a few minutes from Reading station, so the scheme was drawn around people commuting into London: young professionals and young families who would use the communal spaces as much as their own flats.
The brief had to hold three things at once: apartments for sale, apartments for Build to Rent, and a potential hotel on new floors above. The interior design and the brand identity had to serve an owner-occupier, a BTR resident and a hotel operator without reading as three different schemes.
The scheme merges heritage architecture, sensitive to its local environment, with modern interiors and layouts. Warm red brick and traditional exteriors give way to bright, airy spaces that balance flexible modernity against classicism.
Keslake Place is one of several projects with Kings Oak Capital, alongside Kavanagh Place in Slough, Kasia House in Chertsey and the Kings Oak rebrand itself.
The entrance hall
The building came with an entrance hall and a grand staircase worth keeping, and a plan that put apartments in it. Reworking the layouts was the whole argument: we kept the units out of the hall and gave it back as a place to arrive and spend time, with a residents’ reception at one end and space at the other for a second reception in future, for a potential hotel use.
The same exercise found room for a co-working area for residents that had not been in the plan previously.
The amenity
On a Build to Rent scheme the communal spaces are the product as much as the apartments. They are what a resident is paying for beyond their own four walls, and what keeps them past the first tenancy.
The co-working space is arranged in arched booths rather than an open bank of desks. The cinema is a proper room with tiered seating. The gym carries the Keslake name across the wall so the brand is present in the place people use it most.
The identity
Keslake is set in a soft lowercase serif and used sparingly — on a ribbon, on a cover, on a wall. The palette runs warm tan and deep brown against a soft blue, drawn for young professionals and young families rather than for the standard rental market, and it does not look like its competitors.
The same identity carries the brochure, the website, the show home and the marketing suite, so a resident meets one scheme whether they arrive through the website or through the door.
This project was delivered under the Ademchic brand.