Our proposal for the renewal of this site near Tottenham Court Road stitches together two existing buildings to create high-quality and characterful shared workspaces for start-ups and technology firms in Central London.

Our preliminary advice to the client was simply to:

‘paint the existing buildings white and re–let them.’

Credit to that client, however, they wanted something more ambitious — and of course, we were delighted about that.

As well as additional storeys on top and to the rear, our design created a new social heart to the scheme by opening up double–height spaces through the ground floor slab — providing exciting new spaces for the tenants to socialise in, collaborate and build a community.

Unfortunately, complications with the lease led the client to sell the site to a new owner who decided to take an alternative approach with a different architect:

...which was to ‘paint the buildings white and re–let them’.