The Waterman Coworking & Amenity Spaces – London
Fathom Architects transformed four Victorian warehouses in London into a cohesive workspace, emphasizing heritage conservation, sustainability, and contemporary design through honest expression and material re-use.
Fathom Architects has completed one of the largest heritage retrofit projects in Clerkenwell, London – an ambitious re-imagining of four Victorian warehouses over 70,000sqft on Farringdon Road.
Within the Clerkenwell Green Conservation Area, the handsome buildings originally housed a printworks and shops selling bicycles and printing ink.
Incremental conversions over the years had left the warehouses with a confusing array of tenancies, lacking a cohesive identity and contained within an inefficient, leaky envelope.
Developer BGO tasked Fathom – and contractor Ambit – with securing the heritage building’s future by bringing the four separate buildings together to create a single workspace with distinct character and an improved carbon footprint.
Fathom has reimagined the warehouses to minimise carbon, extend workspace area by 9,900sqft, enhance tenant experience and evolve a new contemporary identity which celebrates its industrial heritage.
The Waterman includes six floors of workspace, Alfred’s Club coworking lounge – designed in collaboration with Fettle – private and communal roof terraces and two retail units.
Rather than erase traces of the past, the design allows the warehouses to celebrate each of its lives through honest expression of new and old and considered material choices.
Material re-use and upcycling were key to the project’s construction, including the repurposing of 3 tonnes of glass into terrazzo-style worktops and the recycling of 5,000 bricks, 185m2 of timber flooring and 2.3 tonnes of structural steel within the build.
Design: Fathom Architects
Design: Fettle
Contractor: Ambit
Photography: Martina Ferrera
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