Student accommodation at St Peter’s College at the University of Oxford

Our team delivered a modern, ultra-energy efficient student accommodation project at St Peter’s College, one of the 39 colleges that make up the world famous University of Oxford.

This project covers two buildings with each one consisting of four storeys that provide a total of 54 bedrooms for the college’s students.

As well as meeting the ultra-low carbon Passivhaus Institute Low Energy Building (LEB) Standard, they include a podium garden with paved and planted areas, as well as enhancing the existing Canal House garden and links to the main college site.

To achieve PHI LEB standard, the design followed a ‘fabric first’ approach to achieve extremely low energy consumption and high occupant comfort, with a more relaxed target for space heating and airtightness, providing greater flexibility to the design of the building.

The Master of the college, Professor Judith Buchanan said:

"St Peter’s is a beautiful college, but it is compact. Being able to offer more accommodation for our students matters crucially. Oxford’s private rental market is extremely expensive in ways that hit the poorest hardest.

“This eco-friendly new development enabled us to extend our accommodation offer to undergraduates in ways that are economically so important for them, while making a transformative difference to the feel of our whole estate."

Passivhaus track-record

This is the latest to benefit project from Willmott Dixon’s extensive Passivhaus knowledge.

We built the award winning £38m Harris Academy Sutton, the UK’s largest Passivhaus accredited secondary school. We also delivered Hackbridge Primary School, the UK’s first Passivhaus ‘Plus’ education facility, which consumes only 75% of the 100% renewable energy it generates, selling the remainder back to the grid.

More recently we delivered the Eclipse Leisure Centre in Spelthorne, also to Passivhaus standards.