The School House forms part of St Elizabeth’s vision to soften its environment and reinforce a strong sense of community. Located near one entrance, it can be easily and discretely used from inside and out by both school and community. Primarily an after school club, it can also be used as a parents’ room, staff training room or an occasional classroom. A popular school in London’s East End, St Elizabeth’s maintains a high level of learning and teaching performance, while its many social activities foster a strong sense of community. It’s nevertheless a hard environment with its outside space dominated by tarmac. As part of the school’s long-term vision for softening its learning environment, SCABAL was appointed to design an after school club in the playground’s south east corner, replacing an existing prefabricated building. This project is among a series of others also undertaken by SCABAL at St Elizabeths, including a new Early Years learning area, playground, play equipment, and allotments. Under SCABAL’s wider masterplan, the school realm, buildings, and landscape, are redrawn as a small village, where various buildings and spaces act to support different activities and age groups within the school. Designed as the first of several inhabitable play pieces that now populate the school’s site, the School House makes the most of its direct connection with the external play area allowing it to become a fluid indoors/outdoors space. A small house in the playground, its simplified appearance and scale reflects the form of children’s imagined houses. It has a distorted trapezoidal footprint and a sliced pyramidal pitched roof. Clad entirely in timber, the building appears as a solid object, when in fact, the top of the roof has been cut-off like a boiled egg, creating a huge north–facing roof light that floods the interior in light. The building appears a mostly hermetic form with the generous roof light and glazed corner giving a special ambiance to the indoor space. On the south west corner, a large sliding door opens to the playground, dissolving the boundary between indoor and outdoor play. Inside the School House, a single open-plan room centres itself around the roof light above, and the inhabited two-storey island residing beneath it. Also located within the space are two pupil toilets, a disabled toilet, painting sinks, a staircase, a kitchenette and a small office space, allowing many different activities to take place simultaneously. These facilities are located underneath a small mezzanine space for quiet play and story-telling, close to the roof light, and with a grand panoramic view into the main room. The St Elizabeth RC Primary School Early Years project comes in two phases. Phase One is the replacement of a tired nursery with a spectacular new building conceived as a tree canopy minimising the difference between being inside and outside so children can learn and play freely in both. The wooden roof structure, inspired by the trees trained on wires in the town square of Labouheyre, a village in the Haute Lande district of France, is based on Palladio’s principles of reciprocity for employing short timber sections to make large spans. This artificial canopy holds a ceiling of acoustic cushions and is supported by steel trees painted blue. Corrugated pink GRP tops the lot. Phase Two is the remodelling of the existing inter-war east wing of the school to integrate the two reception class bases with the new nursery making an Foundation Stage Base for the school’s youngest children.