Pearson Lloyd design their new studio with Cassion Castle Architects

You might recall that, a few issues back, we wrote about Bene’s innovative new PORTS furniture collection, designed by Pearson Lloyd. Well, during our meeting with Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd, we took a brief walk through East London to take a look at the (then) under construction site of the duo’s new studio.

Now very much complete – thanks to the vision of Pearson Lloyd and Cassion Castle Architects – what was once a dilapidated Victorian block in Hackney has been transformed into a dynamic, modern studio.

‘After our two decades in East London, opening Yorkton Workshops is a pivotal moment for Pearson Lloyd,’ Luke tells us. ‘Not only did the restoration give us an opportunity to exercise our design approach both at scale and at a granular level of detail, it has resulted in a truly versatile studio space that will allow us to bring everything under one roof, and which gives us the space and flexibility to conduct experiments and explore bold new ideas in workplace strategy.’

The new studio has enabled Pearson Lloyd to consolidate its office, workshop and design archive onto a single site for the first time in five years. Because the studio’s projects range from North America to Europe and beyond, London is in a key strategic position for Pearson Lloyd to serve its international client base.

Spread over two storeys and two wings, Yorkton Workshops encompasses a variety of spaces, including versatile studios, workshops for making and prototyping, meeting rooms and a dedicated area for exhibitions and events. For Luke and Tom, Yorkton Workshops has presented the perfect opportunity to demonstrate Pearson Lloyd’s design philosophy in action – by applying it to their own workspace.

Over the last 20+ years, the studio has dedicated itself to ‘Making Design Work’ – identifying and building functional, beautiful and efficient products, environments and systems that respond to the challenges of the day and enhance our experience of the world.

Yorkton Workshops reaffirms this commitment. Although the space is tailor-made to meet the needs of a modern-day design studio, Luke and Tom have ensured it is not locked into that role. For them, the restoration represents not only an investment in Pearson Lloyd’s future as a design practice, but in the creative fabric of London as a whole. Yorkton Workshops is effectively futureproof: it can accommodate single or multiple tenants, internal spaces can be modified to open plan or enclosed as needs change, and it is readily adaptable to manifold workplace typologies – as the ease with which Pearson Lloyd has been able to make it COVID-secure perfectly demonstrates.

‘Working on design-led projects with an active and invested client is deeply engaging and rewarding from a design perspective,’ Cassion Castle, Founder of Cassion Castle Architects, reflects. ‘We were blessed with a site that had a lot of existing charm and wonder hidden under the surface, and good enough bones to allow a retrofit rather than a demolition and new-build.

‘Being the architect and main contractor was another luxury, letting us fully probe the potential of the building as we went, reacting and adapting to the complex site as it developed through construction. In the end it was the constraints and complexity of the existing site that made the design fly – adding our own chapter to the history of the building rather than rewriting the story from scratch.’

The responsiveness of this approach meant that architect and designer could work together to reconcile the fabric of the building to Pearson Lloyd’s needs, ensuring the finished workspace was tailor-made for the practice. This has proven especially valuable in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as layouts could be easily adapted to accommodate social distancing and more widely distributed working areas for the Pearson Lloyd design team.

When Pearson Lloyd acquired the building, back in 2017, it was (in Luke and Tom’s words) a mess – a haphazard collision of old and new, with a mishmash of overlaid alterations and adaptations that had been made over the decades. Part of the Victorian building had been replaced with a modern utilitarian structure some time in the 1990s, likely in response to a fire, leaving 6,000 sq ft of usable – but uninspiring – space, ill-suited to the needs of a multi-faceted 21st-century design studio operating internationally.

The easiest approach would have been to knock it down and start from scratch, but it was agreed that restoring and retrofitting the building – although much more challenging and architecturally complex – would be a far more sustainable, low-carbon approach, as it would preserve the embodied carbon in the existing structure. On average, between a third and a half of a structure’s carbon emissions are concentrated in the construction phase, so the reuse of a building has significantly less impact than a new-build.

This determination to minimise environmental impact influenced the design approach from the outset; Pearson Lloyd and Cassion Castle worked hard to minimise the demolition needed, the potential landfill generated and the new materials introduced. They ensured existing materials were retained or reused wherever possible, repurposing bricks, steelwork and timber joists from the demolition phase, supplemented by materials sourced from reclamation yards wherever necessary. The floorboards, for example, were reclaimed from a Victorian factory site in Mile End.

The retrofit approach was not only the right environmental choice, it also created the opportunity for a much richer interior. The interplay of existing fabric and new material leads to hundreds of bespoke details for the design team to tackle and celebrate. Original brickwork seamlessly intersects with contemporary concrete and smooth sheets of birch plywood – a balanced and harmonious meeting of old and new at macro and micro scales.

‘From a material perspective, we were keen to approach the building in an analogous way to our furniture and product design,’ Luke says. ‘We wanted the materials to have a quality and directness that was intrinsically integrated to their function. Key choices include the wood fibre acoustic ceiling, the steel stair, the workshop floor (made from the same material as stage floors and haulage trucks) and the reclaimed and refinished pitch pine floor.’