One Lusty Glaze

Award winning residential apartment overlooking Lusty Glaze beach in Newquay, Cornwall.

In a fantastic location above Lusty Glaze beach, the splendidly named One Lusty Glaze is a striking new residential development on a site formerly occupied by Newquay’s Riviera Hotel. This prominently located hotel had fallen derelict, which did little for the town’s image as one of the prime tourist destinations in Cornwall.

Working with developers Acorn Blue it was quickly recognised that a landmark building with the prominence and scale to match the neighbouring Headland Hotel, Atlantic Hotel & the Rocklands apartment buildings was an appropriate response to this highly visible coastal location.

To take maximum advantage of the superb views over the Barrowfields and Newquay Bay and towards Watergate Bay and Trevone, a key design objective was to create generous west facing, open-plan living spaces with predominantly glazed facades and generous sea facing balconies.

In response to a number of site constraints, the apartment building’s footprint reduces as its height increases. Happily, this articulation emphasises the southern end of the building as a tower, simultaneously generating a new Newquay landmark and signalling the importance of this site as an access point to Lusty Glaze Beach.

A simple palette of materials, derived from the character of the town, generate clarity and elegance for the new building. Protruding zinc fins provide vertical articulation to balance the strong white horizontal bands of the balcony edges.

The angles and stepped forms are a direct visual response to the nearby cliffs of Lusty Glaze Beach. When combined with the robustly detailed ground floor stone plinth, these design features enhance the notion that the building is a continuation of Lusty Glaze Beach and the surrounding cliffs.

To the rear of the site is a terrace of houses and two semi-detached houses, all designed with a similar language of details and materials. These houses sensitively mark the transition between coastal landmark of the new tower and the more domestic character and scale of the existing residential road.

The scheme has been awarded 5 Star Gold for ‘Best Residential Development Cornwall’ at The Telegraph UK Property Awards, 2016.