We are very pleased to announce that Victoria House has been shortlisted for the AJ Retrofit Awards 2023 in the Listed Building (£5 million and over) category.

The national awards have been established by the Architects’ Journal to recognise and celebrate the design of renewed and repurposed existing buildings. The Architects Journal have been a strong voice in advocating the need to reuse existing buildings as a means of reducing the property industry’s vast carbon footprint.

Other shortlisted projects in the Listed Building category include Battersea Power Station by Wilkinson Eyre and Park Hill by 2019 Stirling Prize winners, Mikhail Riches.

The project, for the workspace provider LABS Group, has seen the sensitive restoration and renewal of the Grade II listed building to provide high quality contemporary workspace in the heart of Bloomsbury.

In addition to enhancing the building’s historic entrance spaces and central hall, the renewal introduced a series of workspaces, meeting spaces and amenity spaces over the building’s nine floors, that respond to the changing ways in which we work. A classically contemporary language was employed, combining enduring, natural materials and considered detailing to compliment the building’s historic fabric.

The design sought to ensure that it can adapt to changing work and usage patterns with the minimum of intervention, pairing innovative approaches to the provision of granular MEP systems, demountable partitions, and an innovative flexible planning consent to ensure that the building can accommodate change in the future, so ensuring that the relative longevity of the fitout, whilst also minimising waste. The building also underwent an extensive systems and infrastructure upgrade to ensure to significantly reduce the operational energy requirements.

The winner will be announced on the 4th of April 2023, at an event at The Brewery in London.

For more information on the project see the link below.

hutchinsonandpartners.com/projects/victoria-house-bloomsbury