James Gorst and David Roy, of James Gorst Architects, store their materials in boxes on wheels
James Gorst Architects’ offices occupy rooms within Gorst’s home in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a part-pedestrianised street full of independent traders in London’s Bloomsbury district. Gorst bought the property in 1993, and for a long time it was divided into five one-bedroom flats. The practice has moved around, from premises in Southwark to the House of Detention in Clerkenwell. Here it stayed for 15 years, and accumulated a vast library of products and materials, which eventually was severely edited. In 2016 the practice moved to Little Russell Street near the British Museum then to Holloway Road, while refurbishing the house in Lamb’s Conduit Street and returning it to a large family house.
Since Gorst’s family decamped to Suffolk in summer 2018, the practice has moved into the ground floor and the first-floor drawing rooms of the house. Gorst and Roy, who have worked together for 14 years, find running a practice of between six and ten people manageable and flexible; shrinking and growing it with the fluctuations of the economy and the availability of work.
We constantly refine the contents; otherwise the boxes become incredibly heavy and impossible to move”
We’re in your office, which is a library, but where are your materials housed?
DR The black files in here contain portfolios of jobs, and others hold product information for ironmongery, roofing, metal, metal cladding and bathrooms. When we were in the House of Detention we made the very good move of having these boxes made, which are on wheels and designed to fit discreetly underneath desks and bookshelves. They are dotted around the house. Some samples are very beautiful but for the most part you don’t want to display them on shelves. That works for the kind of residential interiors which we find ourselves largely running our office on.
How frequently do you update the materials library?
DR We constantly refine the contents; otherwise the boxes become incredibly heavy and impossible to move. The library tends to be revised because of specific projects; the metals section will be updated because we’ve got a building that requires a metal facade and then we go through the whole gamut of metal finishes.
It’s a continuous editing and replacement process. There is now so much research and development of materials, and looking at how they perform and age.
JG The reason our library is slightly limited is because we really think afresh with each job. We’re not going to find that same potential in stuff we’ve done before, we don’t want to copy.
There is a palette of materials that we tend to use. We’re not high-tech, we like brick and clay tiles and oak, and metal cladding to an extent, but we like to take materials that we can craft, rather than buy in prefabricated.
A lot of very good modern architects are now using traditional materials. It’s how you exploit the materiality of the building. We’ve done ashlar stone buildings, but they’re very modern and contemporary; we’ve done Cotswold stone buildings with stone-tiled roofs. I like the sensuality of traditional materials and their organic nature, I love leather, stone, oak and clay and I can detail joinery.
Are the boxes project-related?
DR No, they’re material-related. So we have one for timber, one for stone, for ironmongery, for metal and for tiles. The fact that the materials library is packed away might be a bit strange for some people, but for us it seems to work. We really love being in the house, and it impacts on the work, you’re conscious that you’re in a domestic environment rather than a formal office space.
How do you research materials? Do you visit factories?
DR Most of the research tends to be online and then we’ll follow up with visits from reps and visits to the factory. I went to Belgium recently, for furniture manufacturing, to see spray techniques, to get a perfect spray lacquer. But we also visit places like Bulmer’s brickworks in Sudbury.
JG We do a lot of interiors so we’re very aware of what’s happening in European furniture and who is making the good stuff; and craftspeople in this country. We’re very fortunate, we’ve been given quite a free hand in choosing the furnishings on several big jobs. Interior decoration is a very serious pursuit.
Do you have a regular programme of CPDs?
DR We do, probably about twice a month. They tend to be quite diverse. The current one is on home cinema, AV systems. The last one was on a specific wetroom tanking system.
JG We’re working on a house overlooking one of the ponds on Hampstead Heath. We’ve had that in the office for about 14 years, been through three different schemes, and endless planning. It’s quite complex, because the watercourse runs through where the basement will be so there’s a lot of geo-technic engineering to make sure the thing doesn’t float or rise up.
DR CPDs are very useful in helping you produce a building that you are confident will perform.
Palette for an apartment recently completed in Clerkenwell.
DR This is Sahara noir marble. In the apartment this forms a plinth on top of which is a really fabulous fireplace. It has an amber vein running through it and, generally, a white vein running perpendicular so it almost looks like a tartan when you see it in a large slab. On top of this, surrounding the fireplace, we have this waxed mild steel, which over a large surface you see as having blue and ochre rust colours in it. It really moves tonally. The two materials pull out very similar colours. Next to it are reeded glass doors, in the same sort of steel.
JG Very 50s French!
DR These are in a central drawing room, off which are bedrooms, TV room, study – it’s a kind of centralised plan that then unfolds.
Potential materials for use on a Grade-1-listed Adam house in Fitzroy Square and the mews at its rear.
JG We’ve used quite a lot of bronze on buildings – exterior sheeting – sometimes from Morris Singer, the foundry Henry Moore used.
DR This marble is by Palmalisa which is an Italian marble supplier. They do really amazing surface finishes within the marble. Frequently you will get the option of honed or polished marble, and now certain suppliers are adding textures like a leather finish to a marble, by rolling the surface with ball bearings. The harder vein remains and the stone sections in between are eroded slightly so what you get is a very soft, undulating surface to the marble which is very beautiful. It feels more natural somehow because there’s a variation in it. This was an option for the swimming pool at Fitzroy Square.
Lansdowne House, Holland Park for Burlington Estates: Izé bronze door knob, designed by 6a Architects.
JG This handle has a little concave place for your thumb, it’s very tactile.
Temple for the White Eagle Lodge on the Sussex-Hampshire border, near Liss.
JG This is a wonderful job, the first competition we’ve ever won.
DR These pieces on the hearth are parts of a pendentive dome, and the stone is hand-carved by Pierre Bidaud who did the stone for Amin Taha’s building in Clerkenwell. The ambition, depending on cost, is reproducing this at full scale, which is 3.2 metres from floor to ceiling. This is the first level, the interior of the plinth, upon which is a glazed lantern with its own cupola above.
JG It’s marvellous for us, we’re doing both a village hall in Framlingham and a temple for the White Eagle Lodge.
