Barbershop duet – ADC

What’s in a façade? Even a very small façade? In Battersea, southwest London, a converted barbershop tells us that the answer is, in fact, quite a lot.

A joint project by Duncan Blackmore of Arrant Industries and architects Thom Brisco and Pandora Loran of Brisco Loran, the joint effort has seen a vacant barbers turned into a home, an office and even a place for high street trade. Known as ‘Costa’s Barbers’ – still going by the name of its former occupier, the name of which has been repainted onto the façade – the scheme is rich with architectural ideas.

The project began back 2015 when Blackmore purchased the building’s freehold. Then, during the pandemic in 2020, legislation regarding permitted development rights began to change, paving the way for shops to be able to be converted into homes. (The flats above the barbers were on long leases and have not been touched).

“With me and Pandora needing to leave both our rented flat and office space, and with access to private space suddenly an incredibly important resource, we moved into the shop,” Thom Brisco told Architecture Today. “So, the project began with occupation and conversation in the context of shifting policy.”

When I first met Thom, he was touching up the white tiling on the façade, being careful not to scupper the letters of his own name which has been applied in red, sans serif all-caps onto it. Above this lettering, the façade really gets to work and starts to communicate in a different way: an arrangement of various window types are encased by timber frames, painted yellow – a colour which is the façade’s defining colour and which gives the building a strong presence on the street.

A yellow awning can be stretched out over the pavement to provide shade during the day and form shelter in the early evenings, creating a delicate threshold that extends the building by three metres, in turn alluring to the potential of street commerce within and social space beyond. (Watch a video of the awning in action at the end of this article).

Just below and capping the glazing ensemble is a curious form of entablature. As it happens, this is a repurposed snooker table leg, salvaged from a reclamation yard in Whitstable by Blackmore who had purchased a set with a view to honour the work of the yard’s former owner.

“It took some time to figure out quite how they could fit but, quarter-sawn on their long axis, they became the tightly grained dentil- or grille-like trim that we had been searching for, whilst providing corbelled support for the large awning box overhead,” described Brisco. “Explained to passing locals, whilst we installed them, the legs have already become a strange piece of local trivia.”

Below the snooker table legs are ten clerestory windows, two of which are fanlights above the front door. These are oriented to be at 90 degrees to the building’s party walls, hinting at the building’s geometry within, and these can be opened as well. Below are two pairs of further windows, set at the same widths either side of the door and below these are two sash windows. Able to be opened to the street, the windows let the internal sill double-up as a kiosk-style countertop, subsequently thrusting the living room and office of Thom Brisco and Pandora Loran onto the street.

During the week, Battersea High Street is quite quiet, while on the weekend it hosts a fruit and veg market (adorned by a slightly aggressive seller with a commanding voice).

“So far, it’s become our home in the evenings and an office across the day, with the occasional knock on the door from a passer-by seeking advice, but not yet a shop,” said Brisco. “Although, with a street market running each weekend, we have been wondering what we might start flogging from the windows on a Saturday.”

“Whilst it is capable of acting as a home, office, and shop all at once, what was key to us was that it gain the possibility to operate as any combination of those three states across its longer-term future. Central to this flexibility of use is the design of a highly adjustable façade and a resulting public/private threshold that can shift, expand, and contract with the chosen use.”

This adjustability is achieved by the double-layered nature of the sash windows, which can be operated as independent screens. These feature hand-cut, patterned glass artwork from Pavilion Pavilion – a project by Edinburgh artist Jack Brindley, who links the work to traditional Chinese and Japanese Shoji screens. The screens can provide various means of privacy as and when the occupants wish, obscuring views in.

Naturally, during working hours, the screens are typically raised, and as the office space becomes a living room outside of these hours, the screens are lowered. The windows have been made by silicon bonding hand cut glass to a single piece of tempered low iron glass, a technique that results, says Brindley, “in an incredibly strong safety glass” and “an extra degree of soundproofing.”

Inside, the living room-office-shop backs on to a kitchen with a worktop that links the two spaces by doubling as a serving counter, with it even potentially being a means to limit access to the more private areas behind it.

Speaking of which, a shower and two bedrooms exist beyond this internal threshold, with these evermore private spaces delineated as such by further incremental changes in level spatial scale. The level changes have another, more practical function too, being in line with planning policy that stipulate bedroom floors be 960mm above pavement level in case of flooding from the River Thames.

To the building’s rear the two bedrooms look out onto a shared yard through triple-glazed windows that form a façade that encases plastic meter boxes filled with pebbles from the banks of the Thames – reinforcing the rooms’ link to the river which is less than 500 metres away.

But despite this predominantly being a retail to residential project, Costa’s Barber’s is a project that is actually all about embracing the public nature its location demands.

“The shopfront is designed to be enjoyed by the surrounding community of residents, shopkeepers, and stallholders,” added Blackmore. “Working on the street as they passed by; they watched us install the patterned glass work, they guessed the nature of the quartered snooker table leg cornice, encouraged our third coat of yellow, and paused to chat about forgotten shops as the signwriting appeared. These emotional links are at the core of the high street’s importance, and we hope that this shop can continue to play a role in the ongoing story of life on this special street.”

And just as the building’s makers explain it to passers-by, the façade is in dialogue, too. This a façade that speaks to the city, albeit a very small façade to a very small bit of city (this section of Battersea High Street is just over 100 metres long). But herein lies a lesson on how to have a fruitful conversation with the High Street, one that can better it, which right now is particularly important as the very notion of what a High Street is comes into question, as their prominence within communities wanes. And as spatial demands become more fluid, Costa’s Barbers is a project that responds to that new need, all while being able to tell the world a story of its past, present, and even future.