Underground waters: design of a spa for a Gloucestershire hotel makes it an inconspicuous part of a newly designed landscape - Interior Design

Architectural Review, The, May, 2003

The spa, designed by de Matos Storey Ryan, is part of a new hotel created out of Cowley Manor, a restored mansion in Gloucestershire. Before being acquired for conversion in 1999, the manor had been an old people's home. Said to date from 1674, * the original house was rebuilt in the Italianate style in the latter part of the nineteenth century by George Somers Clarke and later extended by R. A. Briggs. Fifty or so years of institutional occupation after the war rather diminished its grandeur, stripped the interior of character and took its toll on splendid gardens.

Apart from the spa's function as a health centre, which adds to the hotel's appeal and prestige, it is also part of a larger scheme to restore dignity and order to the manor's setting. Land to the north of the building undulates away to a valley and the architects have taken advantage of the undulations to make the spa an unobtrusive part of the landscape. At the same time, it has been conceived as part of a sequence of new garden spaces replacing the north garden which, over time, had lost its original form. The sequence terminates on the north in the spa's enclosed courtyard and partly submerged building, set into the slopes of the land.

The spa's plan was determined by orientation and the need to catch the sun. Containing an indoor pool, changing rooms, gym, sauna and all the other accoutrements of a modern health centre, the building forms the northern edge of a southerly stone-lined courtyard.

Embraced on south and east by retaining walls of cast stone, it has a brimming outdoor pool and terrace and is edged on the west by a broad walkway planted with bamboo. Allusions to local Cotswold character appear in material and finish of retaining walls that overlap towards the north-western corner of the complex. Forming the western boundary of the courtyard and disappearing into the interior of the building, a big rubble wall refers to the traditional limestone structures of the area (St Mary's church in Cowley, dating from c1200, has a rubble stone nave). The remaining wall is of pigmented concrete and L-shaped, retaining the limestone hill on north and west. Where it is visible, the pigment has been coloured to resemble Cotswold stone.

After crossing the bamboo garden, the visitor follows the rubble wall as it disappears inside the building and curves around to form a kind of gazebo. Retractable glass doors onto the courtyard and a rooflight creates an intimate space full of light and reflection where visitors can sit and order drinks from a bar.

In contrast to the luminous courtyard outside, the indoor pool has a darker grotto-like character under a roof planted with lavender. Inside, walls and pool, striped with luminance from a long skylight, are lined with Welsh slate. Immersed in the pool you can look through a glass wall into the landscape.

Ancillary rooms for changing, treatments and exercise are buried underground and skylit. Externally, their presence is marked by coloured cones around the rooflights which, like pieces of sculpture in the landscape, in turn create a playground for children.

* Buildings of England: Gloucessershire: The Cotswolds. By David Verey, edited by Nikolaus Pevsner. Published by Penguin Books, 1970.

Architect

de Matos Storey Ryan, London

Project architects

Angus Morrogh-Ryan, Jonathan Storey, Jose Esteves de Matos

Photographs

David Grandorge, 3, 4, 5, 6 Morley von Sternberg, 1, 2