11/12/2001
Designs for the Redevelopment of Selfridges on Oxford Street submitted for Planning Permission
The major redevelopment of Selfridges will provide the world-famous department store nearly 10,000m2 of additional retail space and will create a new first class hotel with a restaurant, a spa with a swimming pool and approximately 27,000m2 of high-quality flexible commercial office space. The development will improve the environment behind the Selfridges store and will relieve traffic congestion in the area by rationalising parking and goods delivery. If the planning application is successful, the new buildings will be constructed in two phases between 2003 and 2007.
The new buildings will effectively complete the city block bounded by Oxford Street, Orchard Street, Wigmore Street and Duke Street that Gordon Selfridge envisaged his store would occupy. At various times he had plans for the building to be capped by a dome as large as that of St Pauls Cathedral or a 137-metre-high tower. The eastern part of the store was opened in 1909. The western part was finished in 1924 and the gap between was filled with the highly decorative main entrance in 1928 completing the 157-metre-long frontage along Oxford Street. The recently restored listed building will remain unchanged. The three inefficient and ageing buildings backing onto Edwards Mews will be demolished to make way for the new accommodation.
The two new six-storey buildings on Orchard Street and Duke Street will be clad in opaque white glass. They will echo the massing of the historical building, maintaining the parapet and cornice heights. They will be separated from the historical building by a fully glazed atrium, which suggests the reinstatement of Somerset Street, which formerly connected Orchard and Duke Streets behind the main department store. Between these two buildings is a highly articulated twelve-storey building containing additional retail space, the hotel, spa and commercial office space. Above level five, the central building is broken down into five fingers of accommodation, linked by linear cores. Two fingers contain the hotel and offices take up the other three.
Between the fingers are elevated courtyards, which increase the daylight penetration into hotel rooms and offices. They will be planted with trees to form sheltered gardens. All hotel rooms and offices will have a view of the gardens and the city beyond. Solar shading for the building will be provided by dramatic curvilinear tubes arcing in both plan and section along the buildings faade. This semi-veiling screen adds depth to the facade, softens the predominantly rectilinear vocabulary of the buildings and creates interesting patterns of light and shade.
The unsightly and disorganised machinery on the roof of the listed building will be rationalised and covered with decking that will support a single-storey glazed pavilion providing office space for Selfridges. This accommodation will be set back from the roof parapet so that it will not be visible from the street.
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