Park House

The scheme is an eight-storey steel-framed block with a set-back penthouse floor, sitting on a reinforced concrete-framed basement car park, providing a 91-room hotel and seven residential units. From the main eastern front facing onto West Ham Lane, the central block roughly conforms to the arrangement of the hotel, with a four-storey residential block to the left and ground-floor communal space effectively defining the footprint of the three-storey right-hand block, which is topped by a terrace. A four-storey skirt of building carries on around to the rear, allowing the building’s bulk to step down towards the scale of two and three-storey residential streets behind. 

Where the medley of post-war housing schemes have either stepped back from or turned their backs to the traffic of West Ham Lane, this building steps up boldly to the kerb, holding the line along the street with a palazzo-like air, facing the green of the park. As you approach, it plays an almost New York block-type game, its relatively blank sides finished in a sandier, more textured brick than the red brick of the street frontage. A squared-off canopy – not built to the architects’ original specification – sticks out over the pavement, strongly marking the main hotel entrance as the only major protrusion on an otherwise relatively sheer façade. This sense of civic frontage is increased by the use of colour-matched mortar on the red brick to the fore.

The ground floor level is tied together with a base of terrazzo-like concrete facing, its texture coming from an aggregate of colour-matched brick fragments, which at the corner steps up to form a pier to give it weight. The large plate-glass windows to the hotel lobby and café are flush with this, hard up to the pavement. Above, the hotel rooms have relatively suppressed sills protruding just 40mm on the more ‘formal’ east façade, but with glazing set back to gently model its surface.    

The ground floor of the building is articulated with a concrete base that acts as a register of the site topography. Large bespoke acid-etched precast cladding panels with red aggregate matching the brick colour were proposed for those places where concrete is used for elevational treatment to the building’s plinth. 

The strategy developed for the building’s windows relates to both the urban role of each elevation and the specific uses behind each window. At the ground floor, the same aperture dimension is used throughout, and windows are fitted flush with the face of the external brickwork and concrete base. On the upper hotel floors, windows are all recessed to the full depth of the external walls, the deep reveals adding texture to the building and offering a strong civic image.