Noel Cash of Henley Halebrown, whose library is ruthlessly edited each month
For the past 13 years Henley Halebrown has occupied the second floor of a nineteenth- century former industrial building, one of a cluster gathered around a secluded courtyard in Shoreditch, east London, that make up Perseverance Works. There’s a leather workshop beneath and a joinery across the courtyard – remnants of the light industry that would once have occupied the buildings now occupied by post-production media companies.
A skip arrives in the courtyard on the last Friday of every month”
Associate director Noel Cash would argue that the buildings, which are well-made and enduring, are the sustainable things, rather than their use, and this seems to be a philosophy that is prevalent in the practice’s own buildings.
The office is reached via either an external steel fire escape staircase – or a lift at the rear of the building. The practice size, while occasionally fluctuating with the workload, is consistently around 20 people.
Where is your materials library?
Historically we seemed to have all the materials that ever were, categorised by NBS specification numbers on a wall of shelves and in plastic boxes and drawers. But it became clumsy and difficult to access stuff, it needed constant updating, and became less fluid than we wanted. So over the last couple of years we’ve refined that down. We’ve gone from having a big library of materials that we constantly add to, to being ruthless in editing. A skip arrives in the courtyard on the last Friday of every month, and trains of us carry heavy materials down the stairs and post them in.
At the end of each bay of desks is the permanent collection, housed on deep shelves, ranging from mortar samples to brick samples to corrugated and perforated metals. In between each row of desks is a table-top with project-specific material palettes – maybe one or two projects at a time. We’ve made all these desks, table-tops and dividers.
You’ll see other things we fancy dotted on window ledges, which allows the best daylight to fall on them. You can have tons of materials but you’re always looking at them on a desk, so we constantly bring materials out on the fire escape, leave them there and let the rain do its thing.
We currently have plans to extend the library into the meeting room, with a wall of client-facing materials.
At the back of house is our paint-sampling area. We’ll test a variety of paint on interior ply to establish the final finish. We’ve been trying out Keim Paints where we are using a very economical brick but we want to homogenise it with the mortar.
Does anyone take particular responsibility for the library?
We used to have a librarian who came in once or twice every couple months. The office where Simon (Henley) and Gavin (Hale-Brown) sit was our library, with materials and books and journals. But as everything became digital and with changes to Building Regulations, the academic library, with the exception of NBS, became obsolete, and we put more and more materials in. Now our journal library is largely digital and the physical library is managed by each station on each row.
How strict are you about what goes into the library?
One of the nice things is leaving out loose stuff – when someone’s been to a trade show, leaving out things that we’re not used to seeing, or someone’s done a CPD and brought samples in. Those things can hang around for a while, even if there’s no project for them to go in – it’s good to have the opportunity to react to things, positively or negatively. There’s nothing outrageous in the office – yet! Because we do a lot of public buildings we’re into a lot of simple, but well-detailed and well-made brick and masonry.
How else do people in the office research materials?
We have CPDs in house about every two weeks. Some are core curriculum – Building Regs and so forth, but we always try to do material research or lighting.
One of the architects is our in-house CPD manager and we renew that role every two years, because everyone has energy at the beginning and organises a really great schedule but this tends to tail off over time. We all go to exhibitions, we all visit buildings in our spare time, so the CPDs in the office are either the ones we have to do or ones we experiment with.
The most memorable recent CPD, from Material Lab, was eye-opening and while a lot of the dicussion was around bespoke countertops for commercial buildings, the information to do with lighting and ceiling grids and LEDs was really interesting. People are doing things with stone and recycled glass bottles, things like that, that to us is related to earth – sand and masonry. Sustainability and the longevity of buildings are really important to us.
We all tour the end-of-year student shows, we’re interested in what materials are being used. Some students might not be able to plan a building yet or design a facade but they’ll have bottle glass in an elevation or some small inventive detail and we encourage that freshness.
We also have study trips abroad; once a year, the whole practice will go to a city for a long weekend. For the last one we visited Ljubljana, looking at the work of Plečnik.
Do you make factory visits?
For things like the 550mm diameter columns we’re proposing for the 333 Kingsland Road development it’s really important for us to go to the factory. We record materials when their physicality makes it impractical to have examples in the office. There’s also both a mental library and a photographic library for each project.
Closely-matching samples of brick and precast concrete for the Nightingale Estate, a large regeneration project in Hackney.
“One’s a brick, one’s a precast, they’re two completely different products and manufacturers that we’ve managed to find. This is a joy, finding a brick and a concrete sample that are really close.
The brick is actually a paver, supplied by Hardscape, that we’ve used in walls too. The precast is from the Marble Mosaic Company.”
“Another theme in the office is our interest in how the materials of the inside and the outside are put together. You’ll very seldom see any of our buildings with a half skin of brick as a flat plane. It will be a brick-and-a-half to three bricks deep for a window reveal, so that the building has weight from the outside. Depth, which is represented through material, is really important.”
The evolution of a specification for a Hackney primary school
“In this particular building we’re going for monotone, homogenous appearance with precast and brick outside and a different world inside. For the inner realm we experimented with recycled Welsh slate brick slips from H&E Smith – we had 20 samples with different levels of glaze, to achieve a beautiful texture where the slate and iron comes through the pigment without it going too far and looking likea mouldy bathroom. The manufacturer made us a range going from a solid cream glaze to an almost brick-like finish.
We thought the slips would be more economical but after all this experimentation we managed to get all the specials we need using a minimal number of glazed bricks, so we convinced the client to go for a full brick.”
“These are Reckli moulds for concrete precast. Simon Henley wrote a book on Brutalism and we have a romantic desire to return to some elements. This is something we’d find hard to throw away, but I think it’s very useful in describing what we can do with concrete to the client.”
“The other is the kind of mould used to produce a piece of ribbed precast, it’s new and not like something you’d see on the South Bank. It’s reinventing an existing material. We’re going to be using something similar for precast-faced panels at Edith Summerskill House in Hammersmith & Fulham.”
The Poppy Factory – the premises of the Poppy Appeal in Richmond
“We have been looking at using sinusoiodal profile cladding, which is a much smaller grain than you would get in a normal industrial setting. It has industrial connotations but it’s just a little bit finer. We’re also using perforated cladding to play with light and shadow on the southern elevation.”
The Poppy Factory – the premises of the Poppy Appeal in Richmond
“We’re proposing to put a lot of the office accommodation in what is currently a warehouse space. This is wood wool for the ceiling, and what look like miniature samples of the light fittings, which are actually light fittings themselves. It’s fair to say that the material finish is always trying to be a material and, where possible, not a painted surface. It’s striving to be raw and natural and therefore require less maintenance. It’s also very economical for the client – using things like blockwork, plywood, things that you can immediately recognise as a material but don’t cost lots of money.”
Wall of models
“We’re working with scale – the thickness of the concrete represented in the thickness of the board, from the outset. We like to say we work at one-to-five and one-to-five-hundred at the same time. We are trying to get the texture in the model, so the red brick and the precast is the foam core board, you peel of the face and then you paint it with an acrylic paint that doesn’t damage the foam. The model evolves to the drawing and vice versa.”
Sample of decorative Corten gates commissioned as part of a landscaping project at Buckland Court Estate in Hackney, east London
“We have to manage ourselves regarding the materials edit, and say ‘is this nice, is this relevant any more?’ If not the skip is coming later in the month.”
“Some things we’ve kept around. The gates were for a commission to upgrade the entrances of an existing housing block on Pitfield Street. We made four-, five- and six-metre high fret-cut Corten steel gates and some side panelling, The pattern was designed by Pat O’Leary. We are currently working with Sheffield-based artist Paul Morrison on the Poppy Factory, who we worked with previously on a frieze at Akerman Road Health Centre.”
