40 Cumberland Road
2022–
40 Cumberland Road reimagines an existing 1980s concrete building as a new workspace for the London Borough of Haringey through a carefully considered set of interventions. The new scheme opens up the internal building, providing a large reception area for gathering, event and coworking spaces on the ground floor and rationalises the upper floors to create affordable units and ancillary meeting spaces.
Our ambition is to retain and celebrate as much of the existing fabric as possible and - where elements such as internal walls, floor and ceiling fixtures are removed - to consider these as a resource to be mined for the refurbishment. The contents of the existing building fabric have been scrutinised through a series of on-site material audits, along with the careful removal of existing elements as a basis for prototypes for re-deployment.
In some cases this constitutes straight-forward re-use, such as re-hanging LED lights previously housed in the suspended ceiling. Other instances are more inventive: suspended ceiling tiles used as a substrate for new acoustic panels; faded carpet tiles are cleaned and dyed to give them a new lease of life; and solid core doors are regularised in size, routed to receive infill panels, re-finished and reused as doors and also as furniture panels.
This approach is lean, both in terms of materials and economy, and reduces the amount of material that goes to landfill and virgin material brought to site. All new materials have been carefully selected to balance good ecological credentials and low cost, such as Marmoleum flooring, recycled woolen felt and timber studding in place of metal.