Plenty of property developers try to brand their latest apartment block as ‘iconic,’ which, nice as many of them are, is usually a bit of a stretch, observes CITY A.M., but it reckons the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station into 253 luxury flats and a new headquarters for Apple doesn’t have that problem…
image: for illustration Alberto Pascual, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
CITY A.M. writes:
Other than a three-year hiatus from 2015 while the damaged columns were replaced, its towers have been a stalwart of London’s skyline since the 1930s and have featured in everything from Hitchcock films to The Beatles’ Help! to a Pink Floyd album cover.
But when you redevelop such an iconic building, there is pressure to create something worthy of the structure it inhabits.
So what do the new flats look like? City A.M took a tour of the first apartment to be completed within the original grade II*-listed power station with designer Tim Boyd of Michaelis Boyd – which also designed the interiors for Soho House and the Groucho Club – and Battersea Power Station’s UK sales director Georgia Siri.
The apartment is situated on the second floor of the old Turbine Hall A, on the Western side of the power station. Boyd says there were 174 different floor plans for the 253 apartments, because there were so many parts of the building’s structure that could not be altered due to it being listed. ‘The floor plans had to be tailored to the building – these are not a cookie cutter apartments,’ he says. Most of the flats have long been sold, but when they came on the market in 2013 one-beds like this one started from £1m, while four-bed family homes started from £4m.
Inspired by the art deco ‘glory years’
The original 1930s brickwork and steelwork are exposed, and the industrial theme is continued in the floor-to-ceiling crittal windows and cast-iron column radiators, which are painted black. The apartment was dressed by th2designs. There are two colour palettes for buyers to choose from: Heritage 33 and Heritage 47. The power station was designed in two parts, and the palettes reflect those two eras. Heritage 33, on display in this apartment, uses bold materials and textures inspired by the power station’s art deco glory years when it produced more than a fifth of London’s electricity.
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The first flat in Battersea Power Station is now complete – we take a look inside
