Northcliffe House

In spring 2023 John Robertson Architects completed The Northcliffe House, a conversion of the former headquarters and printing plant of the Daily Mail in London. The building on Tudor Street, which was an industrial printing works until the late 1980s, has been refurbished to provide 26200 sqm of modern office space over 7 floors, whilst retaining its unique heritage features such as the building's art deco facade. The renovation of the offices in the historic building combined the old with the new, but the project had other considerable ambitions. The renovation increased the area by 1150 m2 by extending the top two floors. There was also the addition of urban greenery to two floors through several landscaped terraces and the creation of a new main entrance to match the scale and grandeur of the building itself. The architects have also thought about the office commuters, creating great facilities for them, including changing areas, 345 spaces for cyclists and places to charge their electric bikes.

Around 4,000 Lina80 luminaires were used as the main office lighting, which means more than 6 km of luminaires that had to be specially adapted to be built into the architect-designed metal ceiling. The precision of this connection and the visual clarity of the transition between ceiling and luminaire was one of the decisive aesthetic elements in the selection of the luminaires. Due to the extremely high sustainability requirements of the entire building, it was necessary to develop a new optical system for the luminaires with regard to their lower energy consumption, not only during operation but also in terms of the materials used. For example, the luminaires were able to save approximately 40% of the amount of aluminium used. The linear luminaires were supplemented in other areas by Rundo62 circular luminaires and built-in or suspended downlights Ture and Ravo. Of course, all the luminaires can be dimmed individually and connected to the central control system of the building, which brings additional operational savings with regard to the movement and number of people in the building. Phil Winzar (Senior Technical Services Manager, ISG) explained our the cooperation: Halla provided a quote, samples, lighting calculations and certainty of delivery a week early, which helped the project a lot. I'd also like to mention how good the packaging was, it was a very demanding project. The quality was also excellent, there were hardly any problems with any of the luminaires supplied - only 12 defective pieces out of about 5000 luminaires delivered, where all defects were caused by transport or handling during the installation of the luminaires.

The refurbishment was spot on, the refurbished building easily met the conditions set by the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) in their 2030 Climate Challenge. By retaining the structure and façade, whilst reconfiguring the refurbishment, it was able to achieve maximum carbon reduction and achieve highly sustainable BREEAM Outstanding and WELL Enabled accreditations. Less than 1% of all projects in the UK achieve such a rating as The Northcliffe House.