Projects

The three historic townhouses at 42 Berkeley Square and 1 & 3 Hill Street had not been renovated since having been combined into a commercial office over 20 years ago. The project entails full refurbishment to revitalise the heritage assets.

As the buildings are listed, the structural interventions need to be sympathetic to the existing buildings, and work within their constraints. Key interventions include the opening of the rear of 42 Berkeley Square at lower ground floor level, to provide better connection between the main building and an ancillary space below the rear courtyard. New portalised structure and foundations reinstate the lost stiffness, restoring the global stability of the building.

Davies Maguire also designed various new build elements, including a raised courtyard, and a new, architecturally expressed timber-roofed orangery within it. We also designed a new roof for one of the buildings, replacing the existing 1980s upward extension, to provide greater headroom within the top storey office.

Consideration was given to the option of retaining the existing mansard steelwork and jacking it to a new, higher position, with extended columns, which would have minimised material use and embodied carbon. Although this option was not taken forward due to the associated envelope geometry being disliked by the Planners, the development of the strategy provided opportunity for considering a methodology which may be applicable on future projects.

Other, more minor interventions include changes to the arrangement of internal partitions and openings, strengthening to floor plates, and incorporation of a new mechanical ventilation system.