Costa’s Barbers is a shop on a high street in Battersea, South London, purchased in 2015 and recently converted into a space for living, working and trading. Brisco Loran acted as co-designers, builder and ultimate occupier / co-client in a collaborative process in which the design evolved in response to an intimate understanding of a specific street, available skills, insights gained through physical involvement and a long slow conversation between everybody involved.
While amendments to permitted development legislation meant that a change of use to residential was allowable, our conversion explores what would conventionally be viewed as a paradoxical strengthening of the space’s relationship to the street and commercial location.
Rather than closing the internal spaces off the from the life of the street and its weekly market, a traditionally constructed jettied timber facade, making reference to the street’s historic timber shopfronts, adds a pair of large openings which might operate as ‘kiosks’ on market day. An additional layer of obscured sashes, set with handmade glass panels by Pavilion Pavilion, are lowered when privacy is required.
In plan, the ‘line’ between public and private, domestic and commercial, is similarly adjustable. Consistent with modern post-covid working patterns and with an understanding of the costs associated with having ‘any’ space in London, the main ‘retail’ space is conceived as a space to be worked in during the day and lived in at night, and might even be opened to the public on market day.
In section, the scale of the interior decreases in line with the decreasing degree of ‘publicness’ - with fully private living spaces at the rear the most modest in scale and expression.
Materials, textures and colours chosen for the interior reference the traditional ‘pie and mash’ shops often found on market streets, with reclaimed panelling and gloss finishes marking the ‘flood level’ of the nearby River Thames which determined the raised floors of the sleeping accommodation.
At the rear, in what was once the storage yard for the market stalls, additional window openings sit within a new façade, extrapolated/derived from the language of plastic metre boxes, and composed of external insulation and render, metal trims and pebbles gathered from the nearby Thames shoreline.Lorna Scribo
Link to Architecture Today article (including short film by Jim Stephenson)
Link to Building Design article
Completed photography by Jim Stephenson
Models and model photography by Brisco Loran
Drawings by Brisco Loran
