Farringdon Road listed building development

The existing building, located on the corner of Farringdon Road and Greville Street in Farringdon, is a listed old London cotton mill with exquisite external architectural detailing in the form of hand made brickwork and worked natural stone lintels.

Working in conjunction with GML Architects, this development marked the first foray into the central London volume apartment market for Berkeley Homes, with only Manhattan Lofts providing the professional city dweller with flats up until then. We lodged the planning application, testing the Section 106 contributions in the process and successfully secured consent to develop the building into around 90 apartments, with new floors to be added and an A3 consent for the ground floor.

Structurally the existing building was very sound with a new half complete internal concrete frame already in place which we were under instructions to work with as a base for the designs. By locating the core and the non habitable rooms towards the centre of the footplate, the deep footplate challenges were mitigated and through careful planning and attention to size and proportion, we successfully accommodated all the flats within the building footprint, the majority of which sold off plan. The ground floor was converted into a new bar/restaurant using its A3 planning classification.

The key consideration was designing each apartment with natural light through the existing elevation windows whilst ensuring that the non habitable rooms were not overly deep within the footprint. The external brick and stone work had to be carefully renovated which was carried out by industry specialists and local authority conservation officers.