Reiss Headquarters
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Will Pryce (website) Download Original
Flagship store, offices and design studios for fashion house Reiss near Oxford Street
The functions of the building are arranged in a vertical sandwich to accommodate a store across the first two floors, above which are three storeys of offices, cutting rooms and design studios. A further floor above provides corporate meeting rooms and David Reiss’s office, all surmounted by a penthouse flat.
The buildings façade, facing onto Barratt Street, consists of a double-glazed glass layer lying behind an acrylic panel rain-screen. The material character of the façade was conceived by the architect as a translucent filter with the capacity to change appearance. Each acrylic panel is profiled with large vertical gauges of varying width and depth, which create different visual effects when edge-lit at night.
The south-facing acrylic rain-screen forms part of a triple skin façade, with periodic openings that induce a cooling stack effect during the summer months.
Horizontal slabs of up-lit fair-faced concrete are designed as a balancing feature against the vertical emphasis of the façade, and the diagonal form of a staircase running from the second to the fourth floors is intended to offset the orthogonal frame.
Data
- Begun: Nov 2006
- Completed: Apr 2008
- Floor area: 4,822m2
- Sectors: Office, Retail, Residential
- Total cost: £16M
- Procurement: Design competition
- Address: 9-12 Barrett Street, London, W1U 1BA, United Kingdom
Professional Team 
- Architect: Squire and Partners
- Client: Reiss Limited
- Planning consultant: The London Planning Practice
- Project manager: Buro Four
- Quantity surveyor: Davis Langdon
- Quantity surveyor: Davis Langdon
- Structural engineer: Fluid Structures
- Services engineer: Hilson Moran Partnership
- Client design advisor: d-raw associates
- Aluminium flashings contractor: Como
Suppliers
- Facade: Tuchschmid
- Acrylic: Heinz Fritz Kunststoffverarbeitung
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