A new health and wellness center at Mayfield, a historic Catholic girls' school in East Sussex, England, has become the first completed building to utilize revolutionary stone bricks that significantly reduce environmental impact while maintaining traditional aesthetics. The Saint Raphael's Health and Wellbeing Centre, designed by Adam Richards Architects, combines natural materials including stone and timber in an innovative, sustainable approach that offers both low-carbon design and long-term durability.
The 19th-century school, which features a stone-built medieval palace at its center, commissioned the new purpose-built healthcare facility to focus equally on physical and mental wellbeing. Saint Raphael's includes dedicated spaces for counseling and medical treatment, along with residential bedrooms for students requiring extended care. The building also features a generous reception area and a central kitchen space that can serve as informal classrooms for health and wellness education programs.
The architectural design draws inspiration from domestic settings to create a safe, comforting, and inviting environment for students. The building's dynamic sculptural form strategically reorganizes the surrounding campus spaces, creating a new courtyard to the south with a long, glazed timber corridor running parallel to it. This corridor functions as a cloister-like circulation spine, while to the north, a long city wall visually connects the existing school buildings on the hill, creating a clear gateway and boundary to the wider landscape.
During the early stages of the project, architects initially planned to create a stone outer wall that would complement the listed buildings at the school's heart. "In the early stages of the project there was an ambition to create a stone outer leaf to the building, which would echo the stone of the listed buildings at the heart of the school," explained Adam Richards, director of Adam Richards Architects. However, this approach was initially abandoned due to high material and labor costs, and the team agreed on traditional fired brick specifications instead.
A breakthrough came when the architects discovered Polycor's new stone brick technology after construction had already begun. "After the project had started on site, we became aware of Polycor's new stone brick. This new product, with its comparable material cost and construction methodology, allowed the viability of a stone outer leaf to be reassessed," Richards noted. The innovative stone bricks, made from French Massangis limestone, have significantly less embodied energy than traditional fired clay bricks while maintaining similar pricing, making Saint Raphael's the first completed building to feature this groundbreaking material.
The project also represents the first architectural pairing of stone bricks with a cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure. The roof features VM Zinc's Anthra-Zinc cladding, while long, precast concrete benches form a base for both the north and south elevations. The exposed CLT structure was essential to creating a warm and tactile interior environment, though this approach required careful acoustic considerations to ensure complete privacy between adjacent rooms.
Interior specifications include wood fiber acoustic ceiling panels and felt acoustic wall linings that address practical sound concerns while enhancing the space's material qualities. Chocolate-colored rubber flooring complements the overall design aesthetic. The architectural approach emphasizes the thickness and weight of the CLT panels, reinforcing the building's protective character through deep outer walls that help the facility feel secluded and separate from regular school activities.
The all-electric health and wellness center achieves high levels of thermal performance through air source heat pumps and mechanical ventilation systems. The project, which broke ground in February 2023 and completed in August 2024, encompasses 277 square meters of gross internal floor area with a total construction cost of £2.3 million, translating to approximately £8,300 per square meter. The building is designed with a predicted lifespan of 200 years, emphasizing long-term sustainability and durability in educational facility planning.
