HUCKLETREE WEST, LONDON
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the ground floor of the refurbished six- storey BBC Media Centre originally completed in 2004. Now renamed MediaWorks, it’s one of three buildings in White City Place, which have been designated for extensive redevelopment. The internal architecture and interior design is the work of Studio RHE, commissioned to create a distinctive, striking, and ‘open’ co-working layout. The building overlooks attractive, accessible terraced gardens to its rear, and adjoins a series of street level retail outlets located to the front and one side of the building.
Challenges
Studio RHE was keen to build on the successful work it had carried out on the Huckletree’s earlier centres at Shoreditch and Finsbury Square in London. However at White City, the architects faced an altogether different challenge to success- fully capture the distinctive Huckletree customer experience.
The earlier projects were contained within older, established buildings, benefitting from an existing language and fabric that can be interacted with. By contrast, Huckletree West sits inside a Category A core and shell refurbishment executed by the building’s original architects, Allies and Morrison. So, how do you turn a capacious, double-height, ground floor ‘box’ with
ADF JANUARY 2018
zero identity into a series of highly origi- nal, inspirational, clearly defined yet interconnected work spaces for a ‘commu- nity’ of more than 500 people? An additional constraint is that Huckletree’s space is effectively bisected by a central atrium, lit by roof glazing six floors up and housing the building’s main entrance, reception and lobby.
Dynamism
Richard Hywel Evans, director and founder of Shoreditch-based Studio RHE says: “Primarily we wanted to capture the dynamism and vibrant atmosphere of Huckletree’s first two locations, having spent three years developing the concept with them. “We have a fantastic working relationship with Huckletree based on continual feedback and open dialogue. So we’re able to share our thoughts as we go and be flexible, which is useful when we adapt spaces to meet unforeseen or changing needs. “Together, we’ve drawn on a mix of intuitive ‘gut feel’ about what worked well at the earlier sites, combined with solid analytics to see which elements were actually the most used or occupied.” In White City though, they inherited a blank canvas – a vast space with a glazing curtain wall more than five metres high around most of the perimeter sitting at the bottom of a concrete framed build-
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GROUND FLOOR
Studio RHE was commissioned to create a distinctive, striking and open layout for co-working
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