Moan // Sh!
A listed Nottingham townhouse converted into a shop, gallery, classroom and bar for Sh!, organised around openings you reach, look and be seen through.
- Year
- 2023
- Type
- Retail concept, studio project
- Role
- Individual project
- Scope
- Four floors, 1:50 to 1:20
Background
The building
48–50 Bridlesmith Gate is a Grade II listed red-brick building in Nottingham’s Lace Market, originally two houses from the early 18th century, altered in the 19th century and restored in the 20th. Tie plates on the facade are dated 1842. Bridlesmith Gate is a pedestrianised shopping street in the city centre, so the existing ground floor is a narrow shopfront with three storeys above, which is the condition the design works with: a deep, narrow plan, a historic facade to keep, and an interior free to change.
Sources
Material palette
What it feels like.
Details cropped from the project’s own visuals, facade photographs and model photographs by Wentao Zhang.
Materials and specification
What it is made of.
Specification taken from the construction callouts on the exploded axonometric.
| Element | Material | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Rooflight | Aluminium outer frame with 30 mm toughened glass | Guaranteed hardness and solidity; daylight into the double-height space |
| Screens | Cast cement openwork, poured over a mud-canvas form | The canvas gives the shape, the pour gives the thickness; each opening takes a probation model to let sunlight in |
| Central wall | Original load-bearing wall, modified, with recessed openings | Modified to meet load-bearing requirements; recesses become product display shelves |
| Facade | Outdoor fireproof timber over the retained brick facade | Historic facade kept; shopfront panel in timber |
| Circulation | Lift and stair | The lift serves all four floors |
01 Site and Building
48–50 Bridlesmith Gate sits in Nottingham’s city centre, among rail, road and river routes. Two sheets of figure-ground maps at the same extent read the context layer by layer: railway, road and path network and vegetation, then water, motorways and parking. Photographs from the September 2022 site visit record the existing red-brick upper facade, set beside a sandstone neighbour, and the navy timber shopfront at street level. The last image is the proposed street front in the site model, with the brick retained and a new black shopfront in slatted fireproof timber.
02 Concept
The client wants to talk openly about sex without embarrassing anyone. The “glory hole”, an opening you reach through, becomes the design device and is tested full size in plywood before it is drawn.
03 Process
Hand-drawn plan studies fixed the sequence of rooms, the stair and the double-height void; a layered timber sketch model then tested the section before anything was drawn up.
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04 Programme and Plans
Each floor has its own role: a sales floor, an exhibition hall with reception, a classroom and a bar. Sexuality teaching that began online moves into the building. Plans are drawn at 1:50 with scale bar, key and section marks.
Programme
Four floors, four roles.
Each floor is given one clear job, so a visitor moves from buying, to looking, to learning, to relaxing, and the building reads as a single sequence.
- Basement, retail: the Sh! sales floor with product display and a sculpture exhibition area; lift
- L00, arrival: an exhibition hall that acts as the entrance, with reception, sculpture display, two WCs and lift
- L01, learning: an open classroom for the teaching that moves offline, plus a meeting and networking area for five
- L02, social: the bar and a sunroom, an extension of the classroom where customers can take a drink down to L01 or simply rest
05 Sections
Two sections at 1:50, each with its cut marked on a key plan. A–A runs north to south, B–B west to east, through the stair and the double-height spaces.
06 Construction
The building pulled apart level by level, with callouts for the construction.
Construction
Exploded axonometric.
Callouts on the drawing: an aluminium outer frame with 30 mm toughened glass to the rooflight; cement-poured screens where each opening takes a probation model to let sunlight in; a mud canvas used for characterisation before pouring gives the screens their thickness; a lift; outdoor fireproof timber to the facade; and the original central load-bearing wall, modified to meet load-bearing requirements, with recessed holes used as product display shelves.
07 Model 1:20
The L00 staircase, built at 1:20 in laser-cut board: the organic openings tested for depth, light and how a hand or a view passes through.
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08 Interiors
Visuals of each level, from the basement sales floor up to the bar: the cast screens, the stair, the sculpture drum and reception on L00, the meeting area by the windows on L01, and the stone bar counter on L02.