Soho House’s new Redchurch Townhouse is a ‘quiet architectural gesture’

A before shot showing how the Victorian factory building looked before its redevelopment into the hotel and Cecconi’s. Photography: Lewis Khan

31/44 Architects stitched together Georgian brick terrace buildings and Victorian industrial architecture to create Soho House’s Redchurch Townhouse in London.

Just around the corner from Shoreditch House, the new outpost offers 37 bedrooms and a Cecconi’s restaurant on the ground floor. The site has been in development for several years, the last stage being the transformation of a neglected single-storey building that runs from Redchurch Street to Whitby Street.

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31/44 Architects retained the original concrete frame, stripping away its bricks, and installing a basement level and two extra floors. ‘You can still see the ghost of the original building in the ground floor,’ says 31/44 Architects co-founder Will Burges.

The two sides of the building – which sits on a WWII bomb site – have been designed to harmonise with their neighbouring structures. have been used on the Redchurch Street facade to help it blend with the surrounding flat-fronted Georgian architecture, while the Whitby Street side has imposing plastered columns on the top two floors. ‘It’s a quiet architectural gesture’, explains Burges.

‘We have tried to gently ‘upscale’ it,’ he adds. ‘It just became a little more dignified and civic without losing the rough toughness.’

Soho House Design meanwhile transformed the building’s interiors, installing striped tiled floors and dark wood furniture in the downstairs restaurant, and velvet sofas and midcentury pieces in the bedrooms.