The Workshop Studio is situated in the leafy, largely residential, inner city suburb of Sheffield’s Nether Edge. The building, for graphic design company The Workshop, transforms and extends an incongruous 1960’s addition to one of the generous Victorian villas that inhabit the area’s tree lined streets.

As found, the existing flat roofed extension brutally abutted the original house. The project establishes a more cordial relationship between the two existing buildings, through a new public face that unifies the disparate components and rescales their relationships. To the rear, a new single storey studio space maximises the potential of the site within a sensitive context, with the resulting ensemble forming an intimate courtyard behind the villa.

Economy was a key priority, with the project as a whole costing £900 per square metre. Beyond the street façade, the qualities of the building are therefore expressed primarily through the manipulation of space, mass, solid and void rather than material and detail. Internally the existing, two storey extension is opened up to create a continuity of simple white painted space. This seamlessly interfaces with the deeper plan studio beyond and forms a calm background to the working environment. Situated at the junction of the two is a generous kitchen, which opens onto the courtyard and creates a social, almost domestic focus for the 50 strong company.

The Building Envelope is principally defined by a highly insulated jacket of dark polymeric render, worn over the existing un-insulated wall construction. As with the interior, this does not differentiate between the existing extension and the new studio, creating a seamless surface across the two conditions. The unusually deep wall build up which results is emphasised by the placement of windows within the reveal. Upper storey windows are deep-set, whilst ground floor glazing consists of tall doors in the plane of the face. Functionally, the offset of the new façade from the edge of the original slab allows for the introduction of security shutters behind the glass. Formally, it gave the opportunity to adjust the proportions of the resulting façade in response to its Victorian counterpart.

Material qualities do become important in establishing the relationships between the two existing buildings and between the building and its inhabitants. The stone built villa has unusual lintels, cills and quoins of delicate pink ashlar sandstone, quarried in the nearby Peak District. The character of the stripped back extension transforms through a new face of stone, carefully matched to these existing features. The concentration of its hue draws out their reticent elegance. Stone is also used to form the edge of the new plinth, which grounds the original extension and allows for level access. Elsewhere, bronzed metal elements of diverse scales engage the building with its users, marking points of pause, transition and arrival.

Civic Sensibility was a primary ambition for the project. Whilst the building is necessarily modest, it nonetheless represents a significant imposition, physically culturally and economically, into a residential community where many of The Workshop’s employees live. The re-ordered public face of the building represents this. In front of the stone façade a delicate free-standing ‘table’ of bronze anodised aluminium announces a new entrance for both buildings and brings the perceived scale of the extension into dialogue with the ground floor windows of the house. Ambivalent in its references, it might simultaneously be registered as a portico, a loggia or a gazebo. Passing through the façade beyond this, a slender double height niche has been carved into the existing fabric. From here one enters either the studio or the villa, which operates as rentable commercial space. Gratifyingly, the ground floor of the villa has become a doctors surgery and thus the public aspirations of the project have become literal. For the employee arriving at their desk, an echo of the entrance table is found in the bronze lined lanterns that light and ventilate the new studio to the rear, creating rooms within the larger room.

Sustainability, whilst it may be an abused term is, at least with regard to conservation of energy, enshrined in regulation for new construction. However it is increasingly recognised that the upgrading of existing building stock is of equally paramount importance. This building perhaps offers a model, demonstrating that if considered carefully, initially unpromising existing structures can attain quality and longevity through relatively expedient and economic means. The project exceeds environmental regulations but as importantly it allows opportunities for living and working to co-exist within a community and creates possibilities for sympathetic dialogue with an eloquent piece of historic city.