Huguenot House, Westminster, London
Located between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus in the centre of London’s City of Westminster’s ‘Art Quarter’ is Huguenot House, built in the 1960s as a mixed-use building with a plinth of car parking and cinema and a seven-storey residential tower siting over the plinth. The building currently needs a major refurbishment to make it a better place to live that is sustainable and low cost and a change of street-level uses to be a more active contributor to the streetscape.
Our design is for a radical and highly sustainable refurbishment and extension to the plinth and the residential tower. The starting point is to retain as much of the existing structure as possible in contrast to other proposals which demolished the building.
The first objective is the complete overhaul of the poorly performing residential tower; this involves introducing new thermal performing windows, external spaces for well-being and improvements to the internal cores to provide better access over all floors and allow additional floors.
The second objective is to remove the eight floors of car parking from the plinth and to give this area to event spaces and cultural use. This will significantly benefit the public and complete a critical piece of the Arts Quarter masterplan linking Trafalgar Square, National Gallery, Haymarket, and Leicester Square.
Lastly, the two volumes, the plinth and tower, are brought together through one unified outer skin. This gives the building a high-performing thermal skin that significantly lowers energy usage and provides better comfort levels for residences and uses. The outer skin gives the building a new image and allows large parts of the lower street-level floors to be open and active to the street frontage.
Images by Dominika Kubicka for Jason Good
