Located in the metropolitan green belt around Basildon new town, Dogs Trust Essex is a new, highly sustainable, canine rehoming centre which offers world leading welfare facilities for dogs.

Completed in 2014, this was the first of our Dogs Trust projects, gaining us great insight to different facilities and requirements and provided us with many more projects for them across the region.

The design approach to the buildings sought to replicate an agricultural look and feel. The buildings were conceived as abstracted linear forms which were separately roofed to clearly articulate the large primary forms. Smaller secondary “lean-to” spaces were conceptually seen as being plugged onto the main building, a simple concept which has been expressed in a number of ways to fulfil the varying demands of the client’s brief.

Due to the restrictive aspects of the site, and through a desire to keep the buildings closely associated, the majority of the built footprint has been located in the south-eastern corner of the site away from both the overhead power lines and Stevenson’s Farm.