A Bleached Landscape
The Tannery is a purpose-built student accommodation development forming part of Leicester’s Waterside regeneration. Designed in collaboration with Watkin Jones and operated by Fresh Student Living, the scheme offers a distinctive take on student living, combining crafted architecture with a warm and understated interior palette.
Jasper Sanders + Partners engineered the amenity spaces as a sequence of interconnected destinations along a central circulation spine. This layout created clear visual connections between spaces, encouraging movement, interaction, and a sense of community. The journey through the building is considered from the first step inside, beginning with a welcoming lounge adjacent to the management suite, fostering an open and inclusive arrival experience. This space connects directly to the external courtyard, allowing the inside and outside to blur seamlessly.
Sector | Student Living
Completion | 2021
Client | Watkin Jones
Operator | Fresh Student Living
Awards | MIX Awards North – Project of the Year (Finalist) 2021
Sustainability
Rather than layering applied finishes, the design ethos prioritises exposed, honest materials that celebrate the architecture and craftsmanship of the building. Each component is carefully specified to contribute visually, functionally, and atmospherically, ensuring that nothing is superfluous and every detail earns its place.
Material selection focuses on cradle-to-grave products with life-cycle credentials, supporting circularity and reducing embodied carbon. Untreated surfaces and raw finishes are favoured to minimise waste and energy use during construction, while maintaining a refined, timeless aesthetic.
As students’ progress along the route, the amenity settings transition from informal, open zones to more focused and purposeful spaces. A virtual training room, designed to operate as a remote lecture theatre by day and a cinema by night, reflects the evolving needs of students in a post-COVID-19 context. Beyond this, a games lounge with a mezzanine study level above offers a balance between opportunities for social interaction and quieter moments of concentration.
An elongated spine connects these varied spaces, ensuring that the overall amenity experience remains dynamic, transparent, and alive with activity. A bespoke wallpaper runs the full length of this circulation route, incorporating an arch motif that graphically references the site’s industrial heritage. Through subtle shifts in tone and texture, the wallpaper guides movement while weaving together spatial experience and identity.
Materially, the interiors adopt a muted, raw palette, drawing from the site’s history as a former leather-processing foundry. Soft pastel tones are paired with exposed concrete and plaster surfaces, capturing the honest expression of materials. This approach underlines a refined, sustainable ethos – a ‘less is more’ design philosophy rooted in authenticity.
The pale buff brickwork of the building’s exterior informed the selection of a muted, raw interior palette. Inspiration was also drawn from the site’s industrious yet now bleached landscape, shaping an interior approach that seeks to bridge past and present. This continuity fosters an intuitive and meaningful transition from external to internal spaces.
Rather than imposing a dominant brand, the interior identity is expressed through a soft, subtle narrative. A curated palette of materials, bespoke artworks, and restrained graphic applications together form a quiet, cohesive language. Central to this is the recurring motif of interlocking arcs – a subliminal yet resonant symbol. Referencing themes of connection, reunion, and solidarity, the motif speaks directly to students navigating communal life in a post-pandemic world. It also subtly echoes the nearby viaducts, grounding the design in its local context while inviting playful interpretation.
The Tannery strikes a careful balance between sustainability, functionality, and crafted aesthetics. The result is an inclusive and thoughtful student living environment – one that supports studying, socialising, and the building of community in equal measure.
By stripping away excess, the interiors achieve a sense of authenticity and humanism, offering a more honest spatial experience. These are environments where sustainability and design integrity are seamlessly integrated, resulting in spaces that are both efficient and emotionally engaging.
