Longhouse
A working studio is not an office. It is a place where the quality of the light determines the quality of the thinking, where the scale of the room sets the ambition of the work. Longhouse began with a derelict Victorian print works in Hackney Wick and a painter who had been quietly planning this for a decade.
Introduction
The client — a painter and printmaker with a growing international exhibition record — had been using the building as storage for four years before she understood what it could become. She had not been looking for an architect. She had been looking for someone who would not ruin it.
The building was a former print works, built in 1887, derelict for eleven years before she acquired it. The brief, when it came, was protective rather than ambitious: preserve what the building already was. Keep the scale. Keep the brick. Keep the north light that came through the upper windows in the afternoon and fell across the floor in a way she had been photographing for years.
What she wanted was a studio that felt as though the building had always been one. Not converted. Revealed.
Lead Architect
Niamh Orr
Year Completed
2045
Floor Area
500 m²
Type
Commercial
The Problem
The structure was sound but the services were not. Eleven years of dereliction had left the electrical and mechanical systems beyond repair. The roof had failed in two sections. The loading bay on the north elevation — the building's best asset, a full-width opening with original steel framing — had been partially bricked up at some point in the 1970s and was no longer weathertight.
The planning designation complicated things further. The building sat within a locally listed industrial conservation area. Any intervention to the external envelope required consent, and the local authority had a clear position: the building's industrial character was to be preserved, not interpreted.
This was, in practice, the right constraint. It meant that every decision about what to add had to be justified against what was already there. The mezzanine — the one significant addition — took four months to resolve structurally, because it had to bear on the existing columns without altering their appearance. The solution was a moment of engineering that is now entirely invisible.
The Problem
We opened the loading bay back to its original width, reglazed it in a single thermally broken steel frame, and made it the primary light source for the studio. The roof was repaired and insulated from above, leaving the original timber structure untouched beneath. The failed sections were replaced in matching reclaimed slate.
The mezzanine sits on the existing column grid, accessed by an open-tread steel stair. The client uses it for storage, drying, and the kind of thinking that requires height. Below, the floor is the original concrete — ground back, sealed, left to be what it is.
The planting arrived after completion. The client installed it herself over the course of a year, beginning with a single fig tree in the south corner. There are now twenty-six plants. She knows each one by name.
The studio has been featured in three publications. She has not opened it to visitors.
I told them not to ruin it. They didn't. What they gave me was the building I had always seen when I looked at it — just made habitable. That was exactly the right thing to do.
Rachel Morrow, artist — Claire Sutton, painter and printmaker
