Petra Heights

Petra Heights sits on Finchley Road in South Hampstead, where architecture studio Groupwork and engineer Webb Yates built three linked blocks of six, seven and 10 stories on a roughly 32,300-square-foot scheme. The structure is the story: a ladder frame of Sicilian basalt and Norwegian larvikite columns and beams carries the building's weight and its wind loads, with no concrete stability core, no concrete columns and no steel reinforcing bars. Because the stone is both structure and facade, the building needs no cladding at all. More than 1,000 tons of stone went into the exoskeleton, and Webb Yates describes it as the first 10-story self-finished stone structure built without stainless steel reinforcing bars or a secondary structure since the medieval cathedrals. Above the colonnade and its glass-fronted shop sit 22 apartments. Construction started on site in November 2021 and the building completed in 2026.