AYA 2018 shortlists: Interior Architect of the Year

Today’s shortlist is Interior Architect of the Year Award

Tigg & Coll Architects

Tigg & Coll’s entry includes two student housing projects that seek to fundamentally reinvent student accommodation. Both Chapter Living in King’s Cross and The Nido Collection in Spitalfields aspire to be sophisticated, inspiring and highly social environments with an identifiable sense of home. These are supplemented by a residential interior, the House for Agnes, which features a focal-point contemporary inglenook.

Universal Design Studio 

The practice’s diverse entry ranges from a modest timber pavilion for the London Design Festival to the transformation of a brutalist former bank in Stockholm into the luxury hotel Six. Universal also submitted the First Wing private check-in for BA’s First Class passengers at Heathrow and the ongoing Tintagel House conversion, which is turning a former Metropolitan Police HQ into serviced office and co-working spaces for The Office Group.

Hawkins Brown

Hawkins Brown recently completed a 10-year restoration of the 1930s, grade II*-listed Hackney Town Hall. The project sought to make the building more accessible and useful, creating new social spaces out of previously disused light wells. The three other London projects entered include a commercial office development on Great Suffolk Street and a new home within a Georgian townhouse for Chinese research centre The Confucius Institute.

Gregory Phillips Architects

Gregory Phillips Architects has entered three private residential interiors, two completed within new modern houses also designed by the practice. These include Shropshire House, a new take on the country manor house where the practice combined raw concrete with traditional materials such as leather, marble and brick. At Hampstead House, the historic London townhouse is given a contemporary aesthetic using contrasting light and dark, rough and smooth materials.

Cousins & Cousins

Four recently completed London residential interiors include the £4.25m Bedford Gardens project in Notting Hill, which renovated two dwellings connected by a new basement link. The practice’s Hall Gate project transformed a 1960s terraced house in St John’s Wood into a bright and airy contemporary home while at the extended De Beauvoir House in Dalston, a series of newly created modern spaces are connected by a bespoke steel staircase.

McLean Quinlan

At both the Kent Downs House and Jackson Hole in Wyoming, McLean Quinlan has strived to design warm, modern and elegant interiors, choosing materials for their timeless qualities and using them with restraint. At Belgrave Mews in London, the practice created a sense of drama by cutting a three-storey central void into the building and inserting a crisp new interior using curved plaster, bronze, oak and glass.

Jestico & Whiles

Jestico & Whiles’s £1m refurbishment of the dining room and piano bar at The Lansdowne Club in Mayfair was inspired by the grade II*-listed building’s splendid original art deco interiors. The practice’s entry also includes two projects for Shilling Brewing Co, a brewpub in a former bank in Glasgow and the £2m transformation of the space beneath Manchester’s Corn Exchange to create the Alston Bar & Beef restaurant.

Michaelis Boyd

Michaelis Boyd’s entry includes the transformation of a belfry within a grade II*-listed Southwark church into a Chinese restaurant. Inspired by Cantonese tea houses, this still retains the essence of its previous use. The practice also submitted two hotels including the 275-bedroom Kimpton Hotel in Amsterdam as well as the playful, children-oriented Round House interior, which includes a fireman’s pole to connect ground and first floors.