Architects SPPARC encouraged a family business hesitant to the perceived limitations of heritage restorations to rescue a Grade II-listed Fitzrovia townhouse and create an elegant office. James Parker reports.
London architecture studio SPPARC built on its existing relationship with an ethical investment client in Fitzrovia to achieve a striking and playful restoration of a five-storey Georgian townhouse into a workspace that really works, with a stunning timber-topped extension.
The Grade II listed building, in a terrace of handsome similar properties just north of Oxford Street, had seen a range of interventions over the years, including a non Regs compliant project in the 1990s which removed large parts of the upper floors, along with much of the original character. SPPARC and founder Trevor Morriss were determined to not only reinstate these much-missed features for the benefit of the client and to rescue a handsome Georgian interior, but also to add further spaces which would provide a vibrant communal hub for the business.
The restoration and addition encompasses the full five floors of the building, plus a two-storey rear extension. This bestows a new social hub and kitchen, an extra space for social value community use and a roof terrace garden that adds further opportunities for employees to mingle and socialise as well as work. The eye-catching honeycombed-shaped timber and glass roof also provides a lightwell connecting the two levels – which would otherwise be spaces relying on artificial lighting, enclosed on three sides by walls.
SPPARC has recently demonstrated something of a specialism in careful adaptive reuse (or “creative reuse” as Trevor Morriss prefers it), but in much larger, more complex projects like Borough Yards, and the Olympia restoration it’s progressing to completion with Heatherwick currently. But the practice is applying the same level of meticulous attention to detail as it discovered the building’s secrets, aligned with some modern touches, which has its own sensitivities being a family-owned business.
Design development
In the words of Trevor Morriss, principal at SPPARC, this project is “the product of six years spent carefully crafting and curating a modern, best-in-class workspace that celebrates the Grade II listed building’s heritage, remediating works that stripped it of its Georgian charm.”
He says the guiding principle for the client, and therefore his practice, was that “this was their office, but they approached it as if it was their home.” Having Danish heritage, the client was keen to adopt some of the Scandinavian interior design principles that SPPARC were bringing to the table, as these harmonised well with the restored light and spacious interiors.
The design development with the client saw them taking a hands-on role: “This wasn’t a corporate client, they were very, very invested and wanted to be involved in every kind of aspect of the design process.” Genuine collaboration was the watchword on this project, with the client making comments while the architects were making sketchings and models. This was “exactly what we like to do,” enthuses Morriss.
SPPARC’s main architectural additions were the new extension but also the reinstatement of the top two stories, and the traditional Georgian hipped roof structure. However, the practice was actually appointed by the client based on its masterplan project in Tbilisi (which involved the client’s finance director in his previous role at another family office in Mayfair), before they even identified this building in Fitzrovia as the ideal location. Building on their fruitful partnership, SPPARC assisted the client in their search and purchase of the townhouse, however the client wasn’t initially inclined to go for another heritage project, having previously been in an inherently cellular Georgian house in St James’s, Piccadilly.
A trip to SPPARC’s studio in Bedford Square, itself a Georgian townhouse conversion, saw the client change their mind, and want to adopt a similar restoration approach to a new office. “They thought that it could be a bit too constrained, but then they came to our studio and saw how we had opened it up and made it a collaborative environment, and we encouraged them to revisit a building they had previously dismissed.”
Morriss says the client “fell in love” with the building they now occupy, despite the “complexities of the building’s planning history,” which included “work done that was unauthorised.” He says that the client “recognised they were taking on quite a liability at the outset.” He adds: “We had to be very clear with them about their statutory obligations,” and then the practice got in touch with Camden Borough, who luckily they know well, and Historic England, to show them the location of the proposed renovation.
Morriss exclaims that, despite the project sitting just outside the conservation area: “I’ve never seen a conservation area officer so outwardly distressed as the officer from Camden, when she saw the work that had been completed without permission years before.” The real damage was done on the uppermost two levels (the second and third floors), which were being rented out for living accommodation, says Morriss. “Walls, staircases and roofs were taken out,” he explains – “all the historic fabric had effectively been replaced, dismantled.” He says this was no accident: “It was a very purposeful piece of design, which just kind of ignored what it was cohabiting with.”
He adds however that the disgruntled planning department were confident in the proposed project to restore the building’s character, despite the painful recent history of bypassing planning. And the architects were confident they could “reverse things, and make a handsome job out of it.”
Now, this family office has the whole refurbished and restored second floor as a modern workspace for its charitable arm, as well as a range of other spaces including the new ‘heart’ that is the social hub in the extension. The lower ground level has its own secure access enabling the social enterprise working with Camden Council which occupies it to have a separate workspace.
Redressing the balance
The project redresses the previous alterations to the second and third floors, drawing on SPPARC’s experience of “striking the balance between restoring and re-imagining heritage buildings.” The architects put the emphasis on restoring the original Georgian plan form’s proportions allied with making “sensitive interior responses,” but more fundamentally, reinstated level three of the five levels, which had been removed.
In addressing the restoration of the existing structure, Trevor Morriss explains that as is typical for this kind of SPPARC project, they did copious historical research of the building and its locality to identify how and when to replace and when to repair. “And doing it in a really sensitive and quite faithful way, but not pastiche.” He gives the example of reinstating a stair “in the spirit of the original’ up to the attic, which would have historically been the servants quarters. This resulted in a “very simple, but very well crafted” timber stair, “elegantly detailed,” but running traditionally along one side of the building rather than through the centre of the upper two levels as the previous addition had. Also, the hipped roof which had been removed was restored, plus reclaimed slates, “a lot of lead work, and meticulous details.”
SPPARC undertook an extensive process of studying the building’s original layout and those of the surrounding properties, including using historical documents to create a coherent and authentic result in the restored building. Morriss explains the approach: We wanted to get into that craftsmanship and that making,” which was inherent to the precisely crafted buildings of that area.” They were determined to be as “faithful as possible to the Georgian architecture,” so rather than the incongruous roof terrace that had been created the designers said “let the bees have the roof, and we’ll do you a lovely terrace on the lower floors.” Morriss adds: “There was a real commitment from the client to follow that logic.”
He says this conscious effort to craft the spaces fed into the goals which the client has in its ethical business, and which it wanted to embody in the building, including the idea of the beehive, and of “working together towards a common good.” The hive theme emerged early on, he says, and became the “DNA of what that space would be about, and not just a motif.”
Flagstones were installed in the hallway, reinstated to complement the original retained exposed stone staircase, and the “very strange” front door was replaced; it was previously metal made to look Georgian – “I can’t help think it was to keep the planners out!,” says Morriss with a smile. Other key fittings and details include terrazzo formed basins and intricate detailing on the stairs and floor finishes.
Trevor Morriss says that SPPARC make a concerted effort to “work with and listen to” conservation bodies and statutory authorities to ensure a harmonious
design process.
A hive of connections
The building has had its second and third levels restored, but at the same time SPPARC worked to link as many of the spaces as possible, chiefly using the part-refurbished stair that curls its way through the building, but also critically using the new social hub in the extension created at ground floor level.
Introducing a focal point of a central hub, which was to result in the unique structural honeycomb timber and glass roof to the extension, was the project’s key feature since the early stages of the concept design. But this is not only as an aesthetic flourish but also as a functional means to bring light to the lower ground floor rented space (the tenant is a social enterprise tackling homelessness).
The extension replaced a typically ostentatious 1990s ‘conservatory’-style glazed pyramid (which, says Morriss, “ironically had planning permission,” and creates instead something which explicitly extends the building, but at the same time makes a sympathetic new statement of its own.
The new extension would replace this structure with a freestanding rectangular structure tied to the three surrounding walls, but which would not put any loads on the heritage walls. With its oak CLT structural roof supporting both glazing and roof garden above, it connects to the rear parapet wall but essentially SPPARC created an independent structure, both vertically and horizontally.”
The wholly CLT roof structure is deceptively complex, a web of hexagonal frames pegged together, with a further filigree of non-structural hexagons within each, conjuring up an effect of bubbles as much as beehive, as Trevor says. The individual 1.5 metre sections that form the webbed structure were manually brought through the building and elevated into position over several weeks.
The CLT roof is held together by restraint nodes and tension rods concealed in each of the timber lengths. Above, a separate layer of frameless glass hexagons sits on the web, forming a giant rooflight which runs around the roof garden and brings copious light to spaces beneath. The hexagonal structure is no mere design conceit, says Morriss; “It’s not just a piece of glass with decoration below, it’s a structural shape doing a job; too often you see something which is just cladding.”
The structural oak roof (and the sky) is visible throughout the new extension, helping connect the two levels and provide an unusual yet calming spatial quality for staff members to relax and socialise. The enclosure of the timber staircase leading to the roof garden visibly penetrates the spacious ground floor of the extension which contains a beautifully detailed kitchen with a large table and benches. This is backed with the existing building’s back wall and gives visual connection through to the ‘library’ while allowing meetings as well as eating and drinking. The high ceiling contrasts with the low door entering it from the listed building, with its height constrained by the soffit of the original stone stair’s half landing above it.
The hexagonal new roof is visible from the entrance hallway of the building, offering a tantalising glimpse of this centre of the ‘hive.’ This is reinforced throughout the building with the glass roof visible from the large windows to workplaces, the open stair, and from the lower ground floor via the pleated-glass lightwell, reinforcing the theme.
Despite the theme and the workspace function, the building retains a domestic feel in many respects, particularly in the new kitchen area in the extension: “That’s the idea behind it,” says Morriss. “They share food there, and that’s how they kind of download and share ideas, and how they debrief on things. It happens around the kitchen table as it would in the family home.”
Working at home
Architects Pia Lucas and Ben Salter explain how the restoration of the rooms and circulation spaces of the existing house adopted some sympathetic touches of Scandinavian design, which suited the simple, generous proportions of the Georgian home as well as the owners’ heritage. “Even though we’re celebrating the existing Georgian building, they are very calm tones.”
The selective use of full-height Crittall screens in several parts of the building opens up the space, for example on the third floor workspace, bringing the spaces together visually and avoiding the closed-off nature of a Georgian interior floorplate. While the architects restored many of the original features on the second and third levels, they introduced these partitions to give the workspaces the ability to have privacy alongside modern visual connection.
SPPARC carefully selected new materials that harmonised with existing decorative features. This included the restoration of historic features including wall panelling and plaster mouldings, as well as incorporating contemporary furniture, bespoke joinery, lighting and wall colours.
While the lightwell is a focal point, the building enjoys a varied aesthetic throughout with each of the spaces and rooms having a distinct look of their own, reflecting SPPARC’s attention to detail. The light oak flooring is a calm counterpoint to the often colourful walls, and there is a large irregular-shaped oak design that SPPARC designed for the boardroom at the front of the building. It was CNC cut in three pieces and assembled onsite, like the hexagonal sections of oak ceiling used for the extension.
The extension lightwell’s soft, bright tones are echoed by a warm material palette designed to create a feeling of “calm and reflection” to support the workplace and social hub. Bespoke pendant lighting hangs in the lightwell between the two levels, creating a high-end, relaxing feel to the space.
The ‘library’ room on the ground floor, overlooking the glass roof and roof terrace, contrasts with the rest of the interiors, a cocooning domestic space painted dark blue (walls and ceiling). It offers a private retreat ideal for relaxation and contemplative tasks, with its deep colour offset by the large windows, and direct visual connection to the extension.
Exteriors
Located above the structural timber roof of the new extension is a new external roof garden, accessed from the original stone cantilevered staircase. Precisely formed oak planks create an integrated balustrade and seating area, providing views through the hexagonal glass into the interior below.
The honeycomb motif is continued in a perforated corten planter screen around the terrace’s perimeter that houses bee-friendly planting. This encourages pollination from working bees which have been installed in a hive on the roof, completing the theme, which is a strong unifying factor but still a subtly-applied one in this highly successful adaptation.
Conclusion
Commercial priorities led to additions in recent years, which – out of sight of the planners – arguably robbed this lovely Georgian building of its essential nature, at least in part. However, SPPARC took the opportunity to subtly consolidate their reputation in Camden and rescue this building, and turn it around to face inwards to its new social heart, by harnessing a different sort of commercial impetus. Namely, one that puts ethics above capital, and that has been fully embodied in this thoroughly virtuous project which left no stone unturned to please the client.