Holmesward bound - architects give different look to Holmes Place health clubs - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, May, 2001 by Penny McGuire

A health club, inserted into an anonymous '60s office building in north London, has been designed with great imagination to appeal to a youthful, but not necessarily wealthy, population.

Holmes Place is a chain of health clubs that began in the '80s with one in west London, and gradually expanded over the subsequent decade before being floated on the Stock Exchange. The company appears concerned to employ lively architects and run civilized establishments, and as a result, the clubs are enormously popular. Rather than conforming to a formula, each one is designed for local clientele.

In Islington, north London, Holmes Place was calculated by Walters & Cohen to appeal to young people with possibly limited resources; and is the result of the architects' imaginative and inexpensive conversion of the ground, first and part of the second floors of an undistinguished '60s office building. The plan of the building was deep and spaces illuminated by perimeter windows were low-ceilinged and oppressive. Health clubs -- requiring warm studios, showers, steam rooms, and saunas, for large numbers of people -- demand a great deal of discreet servicing and the provision within an intractable structure taxed the architects' ingenuity.

In general, all was stripped back to the shell and logically ordered with new divisions. A glass box forms a communal entrance to the reception and a long open corridor. This corridor is the division between the social (the club room and bar), and the functional (the changing rooms), and leads to a triple flight of skeletal stairs up to the various gym and studios on the upper floors.

The architects have used colour to add drama, lining the long inner wall of the corridor with an illuminated screen. Made of panels of glass held by Dorma shower hinges, the screen conceals yellow fluorescents so that it emits a brilliant glow and casts primrose light over the adjacent ceiling. The same system applied to the back wall of the stairwell is particularly striking as slender treads and balustrading are silhouetted black against yellow.

Throughout, this modest scheme has been thoughfully worked out with care and attention to detail. Offices at the reception are housed in a handsome wooden box, and wood is carried over into the clubroom and bar and used for floors there. In communal areas (apart from showers where nonslip tiles have been used), floors are grey stone, and the same material is continued in paving around the entrance and external courtyard. Shower cubicles are sturdy, private, enclosed with opalescent glass and hygienically designed. Upstairs, gyms and studios have sprung floors and are illuminated by soft light diffused through translucent film over windows.

Architect

Walters & Cohen, London