Warehouse Conversion

A brick and timber goods store adapted into workspace, with the new structure kept legible against the old.

CommercialFormer dock district2023Completed

Living room with a full-height opening to the south-west

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Fwsbsb · CC BY-SA 4.0

Project information

Location: Former dock district
Year: 2023
Area: 2,840 m²
Status: Completed
Original building: Four-storey timber-framed goods store
Services: Architecture, Adaptive Reuse, Interiors

Description

The project

The building was a four-storey goods store with a heavy timber frame, brick perimeter walls, and almost no daylight past the first six metres of floor plate.

The intervention is a single move: two vertical slots cut through all four floors, one for a stair and one purely for light. Everything else — floors, columns, brickwork, the marks of a century of loading — was retained and left visible.

New elements are in blackened steel and pale birch ply, detailed to sit clear of the existing fabric with a shadow gap at every junction. Nothing new touches anything old without declaring it.

Uniqueness

What makes it particular

The light slot has no function other than light. It was the hardest element to protect through cost review, and it is the reason the deep plan works.

Original timber columns were retained even where structurally redundant, because their rhythm is the building's most valuable inheritance.

Our concept

Where it started

Adaptive reuse fails when the new work apologises for itself. The concept here was to keep the two eras distinct and let the gap between them be the architecture.