French International School, Phase 2

Having completed Phase 1, the school required a second phase covering fifteen classrooms, a library, the school counsellor’s office, new facade works and all new windows, delivered again inside a school holiday, this time across two months in 2022.

The second phase of any programme asks a different question from the first. The standard already exists and the team already knows the building, so the work is not to invent an approach but to reproduce it at a larger classroom count without the quality drifting, and to push the interior further now that the campus fabric had been dealt with.

Greater Group again held management contracting and lead consultancy alongside PMDL, applying the same implementation, budget discipline and cost-effective solutions carried out in Phase 1. Continuity is the efficiency: a second phase run by the team that delivered the first does not spend its opening weeks learning the building.

The interior work is where this phase separates itself. A complementary palette of bright yellow, orange, blue and grey plays against laminated wooden interiors through the classrooms, the office and the library, with vinyl floors and fixtures picking the colours up. Daylight from large panel windows and ambient light from the ceiling were treated as part of that scheme rather than as a service. Three-dimensional functional pieces, the tables, wall shelves and semicircle bookshelves, give the rooms their character while remaining things a school actually uses.

Phase 2 delivered fifteen classrooms, a library, the counsellor’s office and new facade and window works inside the holiday window, completing a two-year programme run by the same team to the same standard.

Taken together the two phases give the school a campus where the design supports the teaching rather than merely housing it, and where the interior, the fabric and the services were all brought forward at once. For an institution educating students from kindergarten to upper secondary, that consistency across the campus is the point: a pupil moves between rooms refurbished a year apart without noticing the join.