Coalbrook and Holloway Li – The Market Building, London

The Market Building is a new experience-led showroom in Clerkenwell. Created by interior architects Holloway Li, the space showcases Coalbrook products and celebrates the brand’s heritage, evoking industrial forms and materiality. The ground floor is designed to appear like a landscape of industrial chimneys, with ghostly casts of Victorian bathroom wall panels in orange and amber resin, which glow like furnaces. Shower displays are mounted onto ‘chimneys’ and situated beneath chainmail curtains. A solid stone, post-tensioned staircase with rough quarried edges leads down to the basement level, where two large industrial boilerlike structures house working tap displays. The innovative new showroom is also home to Davroc’s Bard & Brazier, who designed display units fabricated from brass tubing, and Bard & Blackwood who crafted the bespoke joinery.

Responding to Coalbrook’s design identity, interior architects, Holloway Li, researched the history of industrial forms and processes to create a unique way to engage with the brand narrative. The space is designed around a series of industrial ‘casts’, used to display working products. The Ground Floor is designed to appear like a landscape of industrial chimneys, with ghostly casts of Victorian bathroom wall panels in piercing orange and amber resin. The Basement is a dark, watery space with the atmosphere of a subterranean engine room, occupied by two oversized industrial ‘boilers’ and wall panels moulded from cast iron.

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