PENDER STUDIO
Located at Regents' Park in London, the brief was to renovate a beautiful automotive parts factory into a painting studio and gallery. This building had undergone several retrofits that had reduced the factory into apartments spaced along original steel frames.
A serpentine stairway replaced all vertical circulation from the ground floor to the unused attic space below the hip roof. This meandering stair along three stories required a fire separation that allowed for a vitrine-like case, skylight, and horizontal window that amplified the idea of the stair as a discrete object, separate and revealing.
All structure and finish of the stair was finger-jointed Brazilian wood springing from new and re-plumbed walls. The remainder of the interior was clad as large white cube gallery spaces that broke at their corners for the passage of the stair.
Builder, fabricator: Phil Lardner, Lardner and Co.
Project: Mariana Ibañez, Simon Kim