Backyard Community Club: sport, ecology and community
DeRoche Projects has created an urban hub with low-impact construction techniques, water self-sufficiency, and green spaces to promote the well-being of the local community. An alternative to conventional approaches to sports facility design.
The new Backyard Community Club in Accra is much more than a tennis court: designed by local firm DeRoche Projects in the dense Osu neighborhood, the project connects sport, sociality, and sustainability through a community space that combines training, cultivation, meeting, and learning.
Founded and led by Glenn DeRoche, the firm has over 15 years of experience completing major cultural, civic, and commercial projects at various scales. Thanks to their innovative approach, the new Community Club is the first project in Ghana to utilize a prefabricated rammed earth system, combining an ancient material with a contemporary, scalable technique.
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Looking at the spaces in detail, the tennis court is designed for professional play and is surrounded by a fence of 4-meter-high precast rammed earth panels in a trapezoidal shape. The arrangement and orientation of the cuts ensure privacy and create a wind filter, without completely enclosing the area. Throughout the day, the rhythm of the elements interacts with the light, generating a play of shadows.
A shaded suspended bench sits on one side of the field, while ancillary spaces – changing rooms, seating, outdoor preparation counters, and a barbecue area – are integrated into the northern section of the site. A planted niche connects to the shower area and echoes the site’s natural landscape, a 230m2 vegetable garden.
This green space surrounds the field and features over 20 species of edible and medicinal plants chosen for their health-giving and regenerative properties: guava, banana, lemongrass, peppermint, soursop, coconut, and blue pea flower. Thanks to this area, the project is not just a sports field but also a meeting place for the community, for gardening, for exchanging products, and for socializing, and is also suitable for outdoor screenings.
In terms of sustainability, the Backyard Community Club offers an alternative to conventional approaches to sports facility design, proposing a construction model rooted in materials, local knowledge, and social purpose.
From the beginning, the team engaged local builders, athletes, and educators, from the Rome Masters to rammed earth technical advisors, to define an inclusive and exemplary design process. The space integrates a range of sustainable strategies at every stage: first and foremost, rammed earth, which emphasizes the use of local, low-carbon materials.
This traditional construction method is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and weather-dependent. The system developed by DeRoche Projects avoids these constraints by using off-site fabrication, allowing for advanced quality control and a modular system tailored to local transportation and labor. By applying precast rammed earth modules at this scale, the project paves the way for a new model for sustainable urban living, capable of safeguarding cultural identity and environmental values.
Since the vegetable garden and the clay courts require a large amount of water, a borehole system and rainwater harvesting provide irrigation, thus reducing reliance on municipal water.
The ancillary structures are designed to operate without air conditioning or mechanical exhaust, relying instead on the stack effect for passive ventilation and abundant natural light, minimizing energy needs and reliance on the main electricity grid. An earth slurry finish replaces traditional cement plasters, offering a breathable alternative that further reduces carbon emissions.
The Club’s opening in October 2025, and demand for access to the court, has rapidly exceeded expectations, highlighting the urgent shortage of public spaces in Accra. For this reason, the client has already commissioned a new sports facility near the existing one: a campus-like facility with five tennis courts at its core.
This new phase extends the Backyard Community Club into a larger civic space, grounded in the same principles of social equity, environmental stewardship, and collective participation. The project will also include a swimming pool, gym, and cafeteria, to accommodate a larger public.
