Canada House - our new home

Here at Kelsall Architects we are very pleased to be able to call Canada House our new home. This impressive Art-Nouveau style building is a restored textile warehouse and offices which has been brought back to its former glory by LJ Real Estate. The more we work in the building the more we discover about it and fall in love with it, so we thought we would share that love and give you a flavour of some of the things we’ve discovered since being here.

Canada House is a fantastic example of beauty and functionality working in harmony. From the outset it was intended to be a multi-tenanted building. The original design was a modern, flexible layout which was particularly unusual for the Edwardian period in which it was constructed. The large open floor plate of the warerooms and cutting rooms are located on the east side, with smaller offices situated on the west. This thoughtful organisation and variety of spaces has enabled the building to be adapted over the years with minimal structural alterations, a real testament to the original design concept! Such ingenuity was only possible because of the incredible attention to detail in the original design. Everything was geared towards the idea of flexibility. Below are just some of our favourite features that embody this attention to detail:

Chimney stacks beautifully integrated into the facade design, these were originally connected the the boiler in the basement and provided heat to the whole building

The columns contain an integrated ventilation system with manually openable vents. Unfortunately these have recently been blocked off due to fire spread risk.

The office side of the building contains hexagonal columns to allow new partitions to be fixed to the flat face of the column to form new rooms when required.

We’ve only been here a short while, but we love it already. It’s a joy to work in such an incredible building, but what’s more, there is a great community of people who made us feel at home as soon as we walked through the door. Feel free to pop in for a brew and say “hi”, the kettle is always on...