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Many of the very best things in life go completely unnoticed. They hide behind perfect shape, form, structure and finish (their quality is their disguise). Designed and created to do a very specific job and nothing more.

This building is intended to be part of the fabric of the city.

15,000,000 perfectly imperfect hand made bricks wrap the structure. Chosen to add an aesthetic quality, strength and form.

The windows, the brick recesses, the railings all tell a story of the typesetters and book binders that worked here in 1850, if you know what you’re looking for.

If you see an old gentleman looking up to the building with emotional eyes, he will probably be a typesetter and he’s seen what you can’t, because you’re not a typesetter.

It was important that we recognised the angle in the canal towpath and represented that in the building form. Our early sketches highlighted the importance of how the angle could reflect light when the building is seen from the two opposite directions and I think this comes across well in the finished photography.

The early sketches were produced with the printing trays in mind. The deep reveals and the depths of the bay’s themselves was a key consideration in the storytelling behind the project.

Like many projects the construction process was complex. Lack of space and access. But that’s all part of our job, it’s not a hardship.

The external walls were fabricated elsewhere, transported in when traffic was low and passers-by were not passing by. Placed by tower crane and bonded together with a new sand sealant technology. A technology that you can’t see and will never care about. Just like the stitching in a first edition of the Universal Decorators Guide from 1860.

Passers-by will realise they can now access and enjoy the canal side but other than that this building will change little for them. We don’t want it to impose upon their lives.

The interiors were inspired by ink and the neighbouring canal, playing upon the idea of fluidity and dark liquids.

This informed the ink stained oaks throughout the apartments, the dimly lit corridors and feature light over the double height foyer replicating a fluid form.