New Inn Broadway, Hackney

The site comprises no.7 New Inn Broadway, a 6-storey building in the South Shoreditch Conservation Area.

The development looks to upwardly extend flat 14 by an additional storey. The extension will allow the applicants to increase the floor area of their existing 2 bed premises, creating a family sized 4-bedroom unit.

The development will adapt the existing modern fifth floor penthouse level and construct a facsimile fifth floor, in keeping with the mock-warehouse style design of the floors below. The fifth floor will provide identical fenestration and materials, culminating with a decorative cornice detail. It will retain the existing cornice detail at fourth floor, to allow one to appreciate that the building has been extended overtime, notwithstanding the fact that the building is only circa 15 years old. The approach is common in heritage buildings of the style that the host building has sought to replicate.

At the sixth floor it erects a new penthouse level, set-back from the principal façades below, in a contemporary style. The metal sheet cladding will incorporate terned steel sheet panels with a low level of reflectivity that it takes on some of the character of the immediate sky. These panels will also be perforated so that their solid facing is broken up with the graded texture of clouds to further dissolve it into a varied cloudy sky. This cladding is to be CAM fabricated in line with studies made of London skies with the roof set back so there is a direct interface between panel and sky.

The facsimile approach of the extension ensures that the overall character and appearance of the building, and its contribution to the Conservation Area, is unaffected. The recessed modern penthouse level will appear all the more subservient to the host building and will not be visible from normal public vantage points.