(for Piercy & Company)

Chikako was the project architect for a development in the heart of Clerkenwell combines a 146 room hotel and new affordable housing block, supported by the sensitive refurbishment and extension of a Victorian Ragged School building to create 25,000 sq. ft. of flexible workspace.   

The eight-story hotel features a contemporary, but heavily textured, deep façade of folding cast masonry piers. This play of shadows, angles, glass and pigmented concrete is set against a view of the Ragged School’s historic and distinctive crenelated tower, which itself acts as a pivot for a series of new publicly accessible, external courtyards inspired by Clerkenwell’s many tightly knit streets and alleys. 

Completing the new tripartite composition of buildings is a tall, thin block of affordable housing which benefits from dual and triple aspect apartments with views over Clerkenwell. The building’s 3-bay brickwork façade and articulated gable end is redolent of the Georgian terraced housing that used to line Eyre Street Hill on the eastern edge of the site.  

Project Data : https://www.piercyandco.com/projects/view/vine-hill