Order of the phoenix

Young practice Rare snapped up the chance to breathe new life into a run-down Edwardian civic building in London’s Bethnal Green. The luxury Town Hall Hotel & Apartments is an impressive rebirth

Words Eleanor Young | Photos Ed Reeve

‘Performative ornament’, ‘new material system’, ‘digital craft’ and ‘trace layers’... all these terms, complete with inverted commas, trip off Michel da Costa Gonçalves’ tongue. Of course: engaged, earnest, supremely confident and with a label for everything, we expect no less of an AA tutor.

He and business partner Nathalie Rozencwajg are young practice Rare Architects, and teach intermediate unit 4. Five years after setting up they have just completed London’s latest luxury touchdown, Town Hall Hotel & Apartments. Their converted Bethnal Green Town Hall building fuses hotel and apartments which all share a common entrance and services. As large single spaces, albeit containing full kitchen and bathroom facilities, the apartments recall the days of hotel living, with a modern twist.

It’s the extra storey on the roof that triggers da Costa Gonçalves’ phrases. As we perch in the restored 1930s hotel lobby, he talks of computer generated veils, a roof form carved by light and sightlines. I look at the brass reception desk. It follows the lines of the roof shape, surely pure conceit. Yet walking over to it the warm brass with its crafted folds offers a tangible sense of materiality that nero assoluto granite could never do and sits snugly over the discreet computers.

Exploring the hotel it becomes increasingly clear that here is not just an alliance of expensive taste and theoretical thinking, but a thorough piece of design seen through with steady hands, and an ability to create spaces people respond to. But how did this Londoner-Parisien pair come to run the project in the first place?

They were introduced to hotel developer Peng Lik Loh at an AA ‘global school’ in Singapore and met him again just after he visited the at-risk Bethnal Green Town Hall.  One feasibility study later and Rare was on the job.

It was not just the ability to squeeze in 98 units where 80 were predicted that attracted Peng to Rare. ‘They really did their homework. They’d talked to English Heritage and Tower Hamlets and gave me a whole booklet of their work,’ he says. He did have qualms about using a practice whose directors were then primarily academics, ‘but they were good designers, thoughtful and thorough.’ He talked to them about the resources that would be required, especially with the upfront activity that design and build contracts demand. He is proud to be adventurous and engage a small practice on such a complex project; it’s part of his modus operandi. ‘I like working with young talented practices, you can do something unexpected,’ he says.

Other developers had looked at the building since it closed in 1993 and been unable to make a business case stack up. It’s hardly surprising. Bethnal Green is not the highest value area for development. Despite vivid street life, an air of neglect dominates. Next to the town hall an unloved 1960s building houses a Somali day centre. Along the road a motley assortment of wholesalers and building suppliers spill out from the undercroft of the train line. But the building won Peng over: ‘It was a once in a lifetime chance to work on a town hall, and I fell in love with it.’ And it’s one hop from the City.

The building contains challenges. Built in 1910, it was soon outgrown and a 1939 extension duplicated ceremonial rooms such as council chambers, as well as repositioning the entrance on a never-built square with a new sequence of staircases and lobbies. Portland stone cloaks two facades of the L-shaped building which is mainly built of far cheaper brick. Planners and EH were keen to see the building back in use.

Rozencwajg and da Costa Gonçalves started with archive research, but it was the building as it stood, and one art deco ventilation grille in particular, that unlocked the language the new work might take. It helped them evolve a theory of its history as layers underlying the new – a subtly different stress from the prevalent Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings philosophy of repair not restore. They trawled the inventory for original design elements to intensify the experience of the original building.

The extra storey was designed to appear as abstract, with no doors, windows or roof visible behind a metal veil. It rebalances the back, or south side, of the building with a presence, and fills in gaps, deals with changes in level, protects residents’ privacy and, in places, disguises some of their less attractive neighbours. This is Rare’s ‘performative ornament’ in practice.

Rare took this idea to the planners, with laser-cut cardboard models, and they bought it. The shadow gap between veil and Portland stone was enshrined as a planning condition.
The result is a stylish aluminium powder-coated veil invisible from much of the street. But approaching the town hall it is seen alongside the frontage with that all-important shadow gap. It is easy to see this veil in the tradition of Herzog & de Meuron (think Basel signal box), Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe or the Onassis Foundation in Athens – which both Rozencwajg and da Costa Gonçalves worked on while at Architecture Studio in France.

But of course the parametricism that has taken hold at the Architectural Association also played its part (see page 38). The L-shapes and squares and how they cross each other was dictated by views, daylight and privacy and was initially calculated parametrically with a script to identify collisions and other issues. ‘We tell students they can do all a building parametrically,’ says Rozencwajg. But she admits it was not really possible, especially with the panels. Repeating just 20 or 30 secured a huge saving.

After a reaching stage E, Rare was novated to the contractor as the project continued under design and build. The quality is remarkable for this form of contract, and is most visible inside. Client confidence, super-tight specifications and a degree of arrogance allowed Rare to fight for details. Though some have slipped through – an over-bright brass handrail with a botched corner turn is the most glaring inside – fumed oak door frames delineated in brass, huge gleaming glass panels between bed and bath, smartly executed junctions and Corian surfaces and sliding doors give a real sense of weight and value to the rooms. Rare’s two directors look fresh faced but it is clear they have given their all to this, optimising design, working out an architectural language, thinking out each room layout to make the best of disparate spaces.

As in many hotels, service areas run alongside the corridor, with a lower ceiling height for the air conditioning (represented by a slot detail). What is different is that the kitchens and bathrooms are conceived as pieces of joinery rather than rooms, which makes them lighter in the space. Rare feels these elements – solid wood sliding doors, large pieces of glass – give a better sense of quality than flimsy partitions. They also allow different spaces to be generated in the flats, from everything open with layers of reflecting light between bed and bathroom to a curtain drawn across, kitchens hidden behind sliding doors (lacquered mdf with simplified veil pattern incised by CNC cutter) and loo tucked discreetly behind a door. It is quite a feat to fit washing machines into every apartment, though the hotel rooms do without appliances.

Finishes change depending on window type. Rooms with sash windows have darker wood and more Vals stone in the bathroom while those with Crittall windows (complete with restored original mechanisms) have intense lime green marble. Rooms on the new top floor with floor to ceiling glass behind the veil are different again. All are special. You can see it in the green marble of the bathroom floors, cut to match the timber floor; in the Corian work surfaces; in the lacquered cabinets lining the walls; in the arrangements of elegant furniture and sharp use of lighting. A slim U profile linear light fitting from Viabizzuno was adapted with L and S shapes offsetting the range of furniture while helping in some cases to rebalance the dimensions of tall, smaller rooms by bringing the ceiling down. Rare designed some of the furniture itself with greater or lesser degrees of success. A cross between writing desk and table with a kick of a curve at the top of its legs already has the presence of a classic, but the circular version looks decidedly ungainly.

The ‘feature rooms’ have some of the same dimensional problems. Although booking well in response to the visualisations, an attempt to preserve the 1910 meeting and mayor’s rooms by conceiving insertions as a single piece of furniture means they no longer fully feel like originals or like expensive hotel rooms. The huge council chamber has the same problem, although the space had already been broken into during the 1930s by a connecting corridor to the new wing. A more ‘respectful’ traditional approach to conservation might have made the design of this room less of a struggle, as might a clarity of purpose: this will have to function as a venue as much as an apartment.

The most public face of the hotel is Viajante, the restaurant and bar facing Cambridge Heath Road. This was completed under a separate contract and da Costa Gonçalves describes it as ‘more affirmative design’. The spaces are small with an open finishing kitchen to the 40 cover restaurant. Again the furniture is by Rare and the knock-kneed tables in oak strike just the right balance between private comfort and public sophistication, establishing a gentle rhythm that goes with the hum of conversation and clink of glasses. The bar is less convincing. It is dominated by a silicon dewdrop installation over the bar by French textile designer Tzuri Gueta which works well, in a gothic way, with a few angular high-backed chairs. But Rare’s pews look uncomfortable, the backs a little too low to set up the cosy enclaves they are attempting.

There is barely space to mention the conference rooms, which is how the much-filmed 1930s council chamber and ceremonial rooms have ended up – primarily refurbished. But it would be a crime not to note the original grand, timbered sliding partitions that roll into a cavity in the ceiling and have been brought back into use. And of course there’s the lap pool and gym in the basement, using the same material language as the rest of the hotel but obviously working a lot harder to cope with chlorinated water (specially-treated brass on stainless steel) and the monster gym equipment.

Giving the project to Rare was a huge vote of confidence in Rozencwajg and da Costa Gonçalves and they have pulled it off. In the process they have grown as a practice but not lost the compulsion to check every drawing that goes out. And the real experience of the project will feed back into their teaching: they are already reflecting on the process.