Winchester College opens first girls' boarding houses in over a century
Winchester College in Winchester, England has opened its first boarding houses designed for girls, and its first new boarding complex since 1912.
The pair was designed by architecture practice Stanton Williams. It follows the school's move to full co-education in 2022, according to Dezeen.
The two buildings join to form an S-shape. That plan encloses two courtyard gardens, one on either side. Low gabled blocks, meaning blocks with pitched roofs, wrap around the courtyards in a layout that refers back to the historic courts and lanes of the school site.
Daily life is stacked over three floors. The ground floor holds shared living rooms, kitchens and staff spaces. Two floors of bedrooms sit above, organised off central corridors. The arrangement keeps communal life downstairs and quieter rooms upstairs.
Food sits at the centre. The scheme includes two dining halls placed back to back. Both have fully glazed walls that open to the gardens and timber ceilings lit from above by skylights. A movable partition wall between them can slide away to unite the two rooms into one large hall.
The brickwork outside looks closely at its neighbours. The facades refer to the college's Victorian boarding houses, with varied brick patterns, what builders call bonds, and areas of textured brickwork. Garden walls mix in patches of flint, a pale knapped stone found in older walls around Winchester.
Each house measures about 2,600 sqm, according to the practice. Each is planned to accommodate 60 boarders and 20 day pupils, and to serve the Sixth Form, the final two years of secondary school for pupils aged 16 to 18. The pair sits at the south end of the campus, as reported by the Financial Times, and was completed in 2026.
The school was originally founded in 1382. The practice describes the two Sixth Form houses as part of a wider transformation in its 640-year history.
What makes this stand out is how ordinary the new routines sound. Shared lounges downstairs. Bedrooms upstairs. Dining rooms that open to gardens. For the first girls to live in houses built for them, that is the point.
