22nd August 2019
Brickwork Paddington home transformed into agricultural office by Edward Williams Architects
This article was published before we changed our practice name, from Edward Williams Architects to Cagni Williams
In the central London neighbourhood of Paddington, in the UK, an old brickwork townhouse was recently refurbished and revitalized as a beautiful office for an investments business in the sustainable agriculture industry by creative design teams at.
From the outset of the project, a zero carbon sustainable strategy was established for the building, which encompasses 210 square metres. This was achieved by replacing the original gas systems leftover from the house with 100% renewable electricity purchased from an ethical and sustainable local source.
Within their attempts to keep the building as authentic as possible to its original structure while also modernizing the inside, designers chose to work primarily with natural and locally sourced materials. This was where the decision to put so much effort into restoring the original brickwork facade came from; the goal was to make sure the office still looked like part of the street level fabric, fitting in as seamlessly and impressively as possible.
Inside the building, where beautiful oak wood is prevalent on the floors, walls, and ceiling, there are certain parts of storage, partition, and spacial division that were simpler to build the bases of off-site, bring into the space, and construct there, rather than working from scratch in the small space and risking damaging original aspects of the building that the designers were actually aiming to preserve.
These partitions are minimal, as a sense of collaboration and community is essential to the goals and values of the office, but they do help to provide a sense of delineation and privacy for the few meeting areas that require such a thing or benefit from a little less noise. Elsewhere, the office is a space that feels intimate, friendly, and even a little bit domestic.
Read the whole article on the downloadable PDF or at https://bit.ly/30mNjmS.