The Alan started life as an open forum between all the key stakeholders of the project. In these early sessions we set out our aspirations for the project to be something experimental, fresh, and agreed that our appetite for trying new things was high.

We were interested in finding value where it was lost, being playful with form and providing an offering that was unexpected and new in the Manchester scene. For the guest rooms, we opened them up to expose their original heritage features such as historic brickwork, pitted stonework, and the true tall proportions of the room.

We furthered this idea by challenging whether all of the bathroom needed to be open and channeled open informal artist warehouses to create a vanity unit that performed as partition / storage / sink and set down area and was an interesting sculptural object in itself. The ‘living’ functions of the rooms was accentuated by creating a long terrazzo shelf, hyper domestic lounge furniture and light fittings crafted around waste materials with a kinetic playfulness. 

When we first walked around the Ground Floor similar principles of excavation and uncovering were applied. We wanted to homogenise the different spaces by creating a floor that set the tone for the whole project by collaging together all the waste pieces of marble discarded from other building projects