Snowflake School

Snowflake School is an Ofsted Outstanding-rated school for children with Special Educational Needs, with a particular focus on severe autism. Patalab Architects converted a historic 515 m² building off Acton High Street in west London into the school's new home, adding 30 places to its capacity. Completed in 2020, the retrofit took eight months from design through construction.

The building was originally built for the Salvation Army in the 1920s, then converted in the 1990s into open-plan office space and later used as an animation studio. The 1990s intervention inserted exposed steelwork to form mezzanine levels at either end of a double-height central hall, giving the building a distinctive layered character. Patalab kept that character and added another layer to it rather than stripping back to a clean slate.

Spaces have been reconfigured to put staff rooms on the upper floors, new classrooms directly below, and the retained double-height central space at the heart of the school as a communal assembly hall. The lower ground floor, originally built as a secondary hall, now houses learning and play spaces. The brief was driven by a tight budget, which the practice met by reusing as much existing fabric as possible: partial metal frames remain visible against new partitions, producing a lamination of uses readable across the building's history.

Credits: architects Sophie Fuller, Uwe Schmidt-Hess and the wider Patalab Architects team, photography by Gareth Gardner.