The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) new student housing development, designed by Mosaic Architecture + Design, has opened its doors in time for the new student term.

Soller Real Estate's Base Glasgow was conceived as a rectangular urban block alongside the B-listed Piping Centre and A-listed Scottish Ambulance building.

The stone-clad student residential development at Dunblane Street in Glasgow offers a mixture of studio apartments, six-bedroom cluster flats and accessible apartments. The bedroom accommodation takes the form of a U-shaped plan, which reinforces the existing street pattern and steps back from the listed buildings at the upper level.

Supporting this is a suitable amenity space provision, including practice rooms, dedicated study areas and common rooms for socialising. A private landscaped courtyard area offers multifunctional external amenity space for residents, along with a secure bike storage area within the lower ground and ground floor areas.

Neil Haining, Director of Mosaic, said: "The development has been carefully designed in response to the site's immediate context and the surrounding townscape in this part of the city and provides a new urban block with appropriate scale and quality of materials.


"The overall scale of the development has been carefully balanced with the B-listed Piping Centre and A-listed Scottish Ambulance Centre to the west of the site and the more recent higher residential developments to the east.

"The ground floor forms the primary access level with the primary entrance off McPhater Street. This level also supports a large percentage of the student amenity space which is focused around the entrance onto the public square. The amenity space also breaks out into the upper courtyard to ensure this external space is used as part of the everyday life of the building."

Nick Treadaway of Soller Real Estate added: "Our BASE Glasgow development brings to the city centre 301 high specification student units and is located within three minutes of the RCS. Illustrating our desire to develop first class properties, we collaborated with the RCS to design a number of elements to accommodate some of the finest music and dramatic art students in the world.

"BASE is fitted with soundproof music practice facilities, a high quality gym, and a cinema room – to name a few of its features. This is the first of Soller Real Estate's developments in Glasgow with more exciting schemes in the pipeline in both Glasgow and the wider UK."

Located on an entire street block bounded by Dunblane Street, Milton Street, Larbert Street and McPhater Street, Base Glasgow is within walking distance of the University of Strathclyde, the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, as well as all other colleges, institutes and campuses in the city.

The building is equipped with a variety of outstanding facilities for residents, centred around the main social hub and spacious common room, with study areas, a large games room, a state-of-the-art gym, and an on-site cinema room as well as multiple practice rooms which are perfect for music, dance or drama practice.

Prestige Student Living is the premium brand of Homes for Students, one of the UK's leading providers of student accommodation.

(MH/JG)