Marylebone Square is situated in the heart of central London’s sought-after Marylebone Village. It is the latest, and currently only, mixed-use new build development in the area comprising 54 luxury and 24 affordable apartments, plus over 53,000 square feet of retail space offering a community medial space, carefully chosen boutiques, restaurants and a versatile community hall.

The design has combined contemporary luxury with sustainability, while ensuring the building blends seamlessly into its historical surroundings. Marylebone Square will also serve as a community destination, providing wellness-focused offerings including a community medical space and health club, as well as “Marylebone Hall,” which will house one of London’s largest farmers’ markets.

HDR was commissioned by Concord London, to provide a full range of building engineering services at Marylebone Square, including:

• Mechanical, Electrical and Public Health Services
• Energy and Sustainability
• Vertical Transportation
• Fire Engineering
• Information Technology
• Audio Visual Consultancy

Sustainable Solutions and Smart Engineering Design

We engaged with the architects early on and helped influence the concept of a key area of the design. Our proposed central covered courtyard design required complex airflow systems which would maintain fresh air circulation to both the courtyard and apartments. Our knowledge and expertise in building physics and computational fluid dynamics modelling ensured the architect’s vision became a reality through our optimisation of air movement with solar and daylight penetration.

This unique courtyard environment provided us with the opportunity to develop smart engineered solutions for the space. Mainly, how to service the apartments with; air, water, electricity, heating and cooling. Extensive coordination between HDR, the architect, structural engineer, and the contractor, allowed a number of these services to run below elevated access walkways while allowing daylight and sunlight to pour into the heart of the development creating a covered high quality private communal outdoor environment.

The roofscape surrounding the covered courtyard benefits from an extensive bio roof which houses 150 solar photovoltaic panels, providing green energy without producing any harmful green-house emissions. The building also uses grey water recycling as a water conservation measure. The green roof system extends to provide green private terraces to the apartments. In the basement, two parking levels are provided to both public and private guests which have the capacity to provide over 160 charging stations for electric vehicles.

“Marylebone Hall” was specifically designed to provide an indoor-outdoor environment that can be utilised all year round as a community social hub. Whilst predominantly housing one of London’s largest farmers’ markets it was also developed to enable the local school to utilise the space for learning activities during non-market days.

The project is designed to achieve a BREEAM rating of ‘Excellent’ which puts the building in the top 10% for performance. Marylebone Square is also designed to achieve Code for Sustainable Homes Level 4.