Eagle House wins BCO Refurbished Workplace Award

27th October 2020
Eagle House wins BCO Refurbished Workplace Award

Selected for its bold and imaginative transformation into a modern workplace, Eagle House was crowned best Refurbished/Recycled Workplace at the BCO Awards 2020 (South of England and South Wales).

Our client and building occupier, Immediate Media, are a special interest content and platform company. They wanted to relocate 500 of their staff from a disjointed office space into a single premises that celebrates their creative employees and collaborative working ethos.

Eagle House, built in the 1930s in the heart of Bristol’s historic city centre, provided Immediate Media with the perfect opportunity to occupy a single building in a prominent location.

However, with such a large workforce, the building would need an extra storey to accommodate the growing numbers. They also required the building to work as a whole – inhabited and saturated with creativity and activity from basement to roof – without barriers or areas with a ‘back office’ feel.

Responding to the brief, we added a zinc clad mansard roof which blends perfectly alongside the adjacent St Stephen’s House and is sensitive to vistas across the city centre.

By taking the existing external courtyard and enclosing it with the new roof storey, we created a full height atrium to provide the building with a new main circulation core. This new core allows for the staff to work more collaboratively, providing direct visual contact across all floors.

An auditorium cuts into the ground floor, opening up the basement to the rest of the building. This provides the occupiers with the opportunity for a flexible working environment throughout the building.

The BCO judges acknowledged the many challenges this project faced during the refurbishment, but were impressed by the clear, efficient and attractive space that has been delivered through the final design:

The drastic improvement to the building’s internal space, where the addition of an impressive atrium, a roof terrace, a central staircase, and a remodelled entrance and auditorium space have all brought a new sense of character to the building.

Director and Head of Workplace, Tristan Rhodes commented on the win:

We are very pleased to have won this award which we see as an important external validation of our work in the creative reuse of this iconic Bristol building. The brief was full of challenge and vision and the team revelled in the opportunity to work with such an engaged and enlightened client.

The reuse of existing buildings is a significant factor in the built environment’s contribution to reducing energy consumption and here we have a project that both delights and reuses an existing asset.

Congratulations to the client and project team: Immediate Media Co, Lorenc, Box Twenty, Grove Property, Craddys and Meronden.

Having won the South of England and South Wales regional award, Eagle House will now go through to the BCO National Awards held virtually on 26th January 2021.

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