VISITOR ATTRACTIONS
Brix has been with Bacardi, the
parent company, for 10 years and with Bombay Sapphire Spirits Company for the past seven. He talked to Attractions Management and gave us a facility tour.
What does your job entail? As estate manager I handle visitors and publicity. I work with the master distiller, Nik Fordham, who’s in charge of production – 25 million litres of gin a year.
Can you describe the visitor experience? It’s going behind the curtains of Bombay Sapphire, seeing the people and the place where it’s made, where all the ingredients come from. Visitors can come and see the distillery, the raw ingredients, the production process. Beyond that, if you’re interested in
history, architecture, sustainability, horticulture or ecology, then there’s something for everyone to come and have a look at. Laverstoke Mill is a fascinating place in its own right, but being the home of Bombay Sapphire is the jewel in the crown, if you’ll excuse the pun.
Waste produced by the distillation process in the still house is recycled to warm the botanical glass houses
The site was already amazing, but the glass houses add a bit of modernity, and Bombay Sapphire has always been about the old and new juxtaposition, and I think this lives up to it perfectly.
How did the project come about? There was a fi re in 2006 at the facility where Bombay Sapphire was produced by our contractor. After the fi re we decided we were big enough to set up our own distillery. The operations side was trying to deal with rising demand while producing the gin as sustainably as possible. On the experiential and marketing side, we wanted to show the craftsmanship and skill that go into every drop of Bombay Sapphire. We also had huge traditional copper stills, dating back to 1831, to distil the gin, which we’ve made central to the new home.
How did you end up at this Victorian paper mill in the countryside? We wanted the English countryside to be the setting for our iconic English gin. We also wanted a site which was suitable
for redevelopment. We were inspired by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, which says the English countryside is a fi nite resource that needs to be preserved. We wanted to repurpose or bring a building back to life instead of building fresh. This Hampshire site dates back to 903.
We achieved our commercial aspirations and restored a piece of English heritage.
How many visitors do you hope to attract? We have a visitor target of around 80,000 a year. We have a maximum daily capacity, but we have a well-considered system to restrict numbers as needs be.
Why did you commission Heatherwick Studio? We had a long-standing relationship with Thomas Heatherwick. He won a glass design competition we ran about 10 years ago and he’s judged competitions for us in the past. There was a natural tie-in with their ideas. Heatherwick Studio had that added insight about who we are and that was big for us. We didn’t want to just
THE GLASS HOUSES
Eliot Postma, project manager, Heatherwick Studio
“A lovely thing about Bombay Sapphire is the crazy lengths they go to source their botanicals, from India, China and Spain. We loved that as part of their story. A quirk of the distillation process is that it produces a huge amount of
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excess heat. These two things came together and we saw an opportunity to create a couple of greenhouses that could use the excess energy to grow specimens of the botanicals that go into the gin. The hot air is circulated from the still building into the glass houses. We created a tropical and a Mediterranean glass house alongside the stills, right in the heart of the site.
There’s an amazing
Victorian heritage of glass house engineering in the UK – like the Palm House at Kew Gardens. We brought that Victorian elegance to the 21st century by applying the most innovative glass technology. We created a very contemporary glass structure that isn’t afraid of the steel, using the steel to accentuate the form of the glass houses.”
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AM 1 2015 ©Cybertrek 2015
PHOTO: © ELENA HEATHERWICK
PHOTO: © HEATHERWICK STUDIOS
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