British designers Weedon Partnership, the practice responsible for designing the award-winning headquarters and production facility at Gaydon, have created an immersive sensory environment that mirrors the experience and sensation of an Aston Martin.

The 2700m² building represents a complex interplay between space, light, transparency and security. One side of the new building is faced entirely in glass, braced with glass beams, to help maximise the feeling of transparency and flooding the studio floor with natural light which is paramount to the designers. At the same time, flush light fittings provide hidden, ambient light, supplemented and enhanced by the customised and highly adjustable lighting rigs used to develop the clay surfaces.

The studio floor is equipped with five full-size ‘plates’ that enable designs to be worked on ergonomically whilst also offering the studio the opportunity to retain and develop designs for longer.

The public foyer area has been designed to be used as both a gallery and a VIP area for launches and private viewings and is equipped with the latest audio visual technology with theatre sound, lighting and integrated turntable for presentation.

Crucially, the new studio also houses an external viewing garden, an essential but secretive space that’s used to see the effect of natural daylight on models. The viewing garden is screened from the rest of the facility by a hand laid stone wall, landscaping and water features.

Aston Martin has become synonymous with design excellence, and the creation of the new design studio will provide a fitting environment for the development of the next generation of production cars.

Environmental Credentials

The studio was built by Austrian company Holzbau Saurer – a company with long experience of modular wooden structures to extremely high degrees of accuracy and craftsmanship.

The studio's modular wooden construction offers a number of advantages, not least the fact that the building is highly sustainable, even when transportation costs from the Austrian factory are taken into account.

The façade and flooring use 30 cubic metres of oak from the Bodensee region of Switzerland, coupled with 473 cubic metres of Austrian spruce in the beams, wall construction, ceiling and roof. Remarkably, this amount of spruce represents just 9 minutes growth in Austria’s extensive and highly managed forests.

The extensive use of wood is coupled with other highly efficient environmental technologies, including a ‘green’ sedum roof, which helps the building integrate into the surrounding landscape and provides a high level of insulation, reducing energy requirements.

The studios cooling and heating system uses a closed loop vertical ground water system. This incorporates 30 bore holes each 100m deep and has more than 12km of underground pipework. A heat pump is used to convert cold water from the naturally cooled ground water pipes into heat. This process uses only one third of the energy to heat the building of conventional systems.

All floors have underfloor heating and cooling using a low energy ‘gravivent’ system. The main wooden structure is insulated to a high specification using natural hemp insulation.