Boutique Hotel, Portobello
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Turning the corner with one of London’s most vibrant and dynamic streets, Portobello House stands at the beating heart of the North Kensington community. At once a public house and a hotel, it provides a space where locals and visitors can come together to experience the warm hospitality of their hosts. We undertook works to restore and refurbish this community asset with sensitivity and pride, ensuring our interventions not only improved the standard of the accommodation, restaurant, and bar, but enhanced the aesthetic quality of the wider streetscape.
It was essential that we installed a mansard if we were to increase the gross internal floor area and ensure the feasibility of the project. Improved circulation was an important aspect of the scheme, meaning a lift needed to be installed to aid vertical movement through the building. And flexibility was non-negotiable insofar as options for the upper storeys were concerned, permissions being required for various iterations of the scheme – including five hotel rooms, an ancillary function room, and a penthouse apartment – enabling the client to subject them to rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
We took these expressed requirements less as a necessary compromise than an opportunity to think creatively about how best to build upon the existing architectural vernacular. The pattern and proportions of the proposed dormer windows were influenced by the existing hierarchy and alignment of windows below. As in the lower levels, the fenestration reflects the reduction of window height travelling up the building, the French doors taking cues from the central mullions on the second storey. In working with a stepped plan, we were able to introduce a mezzanine level to the mansard volume without compromising the visual impact on the streetscene, a harmonious Classically influenced form rendered in the area’s trademark slate tiles.
With the promise of a contemporary cocktail bar in the enhanced basement space and a fresh, bright restaurant at ground level, we proposed to enhance the functionality and design quality of an asset with an uncertain future. Thus, our proposals secured the uncompromising support of Kensington & Chelsea’s planning department.
