Exchange House

Exchange House is part of Broadgate, British Land and GICs 13-hectare dynamic neighbourhood, which offers some of London’s best connected, highest-quality and most sustainable space.

We were commissioned to refurbish 82,000 sq ft of office accommodation to CAT A, restyle the ground-floor reception, add new best-in-class commuter facilities and create amenity space in the form of a new rooftop terrace. The studio’s response is site-specific, drawing upon the architectural significance of the building with a series of choreographed interventions which warm, humanise and transform the building's shared spaces.

One of sixteen buildings that make up the Broadgate campus, Exchange House was originally designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) and completed in 1990. The ten-storey building occupies a prominent position on the campus, located directly over Network Rail train tracks that run north of Liverpool Street Station.

Our approach celebrates the structural honesty of the existing building - its expressed frame and clear relationship with the Victorian engineering of the station's roof structure. Internally, this has resulted in exposing the building’s steel trusses and coordinating its soffit with exposed services on several building levels.

Bespoke joinery, furniture, and art add warmth and tactility to the ground-floor reception. Specially commissioned artwork by artists Nadine Bell and Kangan Arora have resulted in ceramics and tapestries, inspired by the space’s rich material palette and the newly landscaped Exchange Square.

As part of the project’s sustainability strategy, we upgraded the building’s existing MEPH systems. Guided by circularity principles we re-used over 4000 sq ft of the building's existing Pentelikon marble floor throughout the project to create a new bespoke terrazzo floor, concrete wall panelling and WC vanity worktops.

A significant upgrade to accessibility as well as the end of trip experience includes new high quality cycle storage and changing facilities within the basement as well as an upgraded cyclist route in and accessible entrances.

The introduction of new planting on the rooftop terrace contributes to the promotion of biodiversity and wellness for the building’s users and links the building to the revitalised Exchange Square.