Refurbished common parts to office building with new bike store and wayfinding
Access to recessed lift, stair and bike store
Signage and concealed bike store
St Martin's Lane
London, WC2
The Shaftesbury Estate required an upgrade to common parts to complement office refurbishments elsewhere in the building.
Despite its St Martin’s Lane address the building is actually situated around the corner Cranbourne Street and whilst residents of the mixed use building may have enjoyed the anonymity, visitors to commercial premises often ended up in the adjacent Pret seeking orientation!
The existing entrance space was a result of sequential historic refurbishments and had ended up with a large redundant seating area, insufficient lighting, overbearing mailboxes and confusing signage.
Delving into the history of the area we discovered that Thomas Chippendale’s original workshop had been sited in the adjacent building and his elegant pattern books became a point of departure for the reconfiguration of the common parts.
New signage and Chippendale wallpaper
Detail of timber feature wall and signage
We designed a wallpaper based on one of Chippendale’s more restrained bed pillars and continued this rhythm round into a ribbed oak screen on the rear wall. The screen was sited to enclose a redundant ex-reception desk area, which enabled the formation of a new bicycle store – a common request from new office tenants.
The screen also housed new signage – visible from the street -and whose presence behind the ribs changed as visitors moved past the screen and into the building. New graphics gave visual clues to a small lift location off the main stair core.
The new bicycle store entrance is carefully concealed within the screen in a nod to the occasional playfulness of Victorian joinery.
With new ribbed glass pendants fitted tight to the ceiling, high temperature wall wash concealed lighting and a characterful terrazzo tiled floor, the new entrance space has been transformed into a popular, light filled and accessible entrance space befitting the newly refurbished office spaces on upper floors.
