Padel & Social Club — Majori Manor, Jūrmala

01

The club

A club that happens to have courts.

The complex sits at the daylight end of the estate, inside the park. Four panoramic courts fill the middle of it, and both edges are given over to everything that happens around a game rather than during one.

A clipped yew hedge runs the whole way round, lit low along its length once the evening comes. From the park it is a green wall with one way in; inside it the complex is its own place.

The whole complex at night: the clubhouse and its sign at the left, the lit path and hedge across the foreground, glazed courts running away to the right

The club, from the park

02

The complex

Four courts, and two edges.

Courts: Four panoramic
Complex width: 53.0 m
Social zone: 6.5 m · open bar, lounge, padel shop
Sanitary zone: 37.5 m · 19 shower cabins, 2 WC modules
Enclosure: Clipped yew hedge, 1.8–2.2 m

The club crest is set at the centre of each court.

The plan

The complex is 53.0 metres across.
Four panoramic courts, in two rows of two, filling the centre.
The social zone, 6.5 metres along the right-hand edge: open bar, lounge, padel shop.
The sanitary zone, 37.5 metres along the left-hand edge: 19 shower cabins and two WC modules.
A clipped yew hedge, 1.8 to 2.2 metres, around the whole perimeter.
The main entrance, on the centre line at the foot of the plan.

The courts late in the afternoon, seen along the hedge: glass and steel walls, blue-grey surfaces, players between them

03

Playing here

The courts.

An hour before sunset

Four panoramic courts, and the crest of the club at the centre of each one.

Private tournaments, members' matches, coaching, guests playing here for the first time, and the club's own events: the courts carry all of it, and the complex is arranged so that none of it has to happen in a hurry.

An event can take the whole of it — four courts, the bar and the lounge together — or one court and a table for afterwards. Both happen here.

Six and a half metres down one edge, carrying three things.

The open bar, the lounge and the padel shop. The bar looks onto the courts, so a match is watched from a chair as easily as from the side of it.

The lounge is the part that stays busy after the courts have gone quiet — people who came to play and stayed for the afternoon, and people who never went on court at all.

A lit cabinet of club rackets above a row of ball lockers, a court visible through the glass beyond — The padel shop

The bar under its canopy at dusk, the club racket standing on the deck, a lit court to the right — The bar, and the court beyond it

The lit club sign on the grass at blue hour, the clipped hedge running away behind it and the manor house lit at the end of the path

05

The park

Inside the park walls.

The way in, and the house behind it

The courts are not a facility beside the estate. They are inside it.

The same gates, the same walk, the same trees. What is on the other side of the hedge is the park, and what is on the other side of the park is the house.