Costa’s Barbers: the shop-to-home conversion that’s a cut above

Everyone knows that high streets are under threat, caught in spirals of decline driven by the rise of online shopping. It’s also obvious, or should be, that the government’s big idea for responding to this crisis, which is to make it possible to convert shops into homes without planning permission, mostly makes things worse. Welcoming shop fronts get replaced by crude brick walls with sash windows punched into them. Dead space is created on the frontage; footfall slackens. The high values of residential property give owners a strong incentive to close shops and make them into cheap flats – cheap to build, that is, not to buy or rent.

Costa’s Barbers, a project in Battersea, south London, shows how such changes may be done differently. It’s a shop-to-home conversion, except that its design does everything it can to animate the street where it stands, and to leave open the possibility that future uses will involve transactions between inside and out. It’s a work of craft and delight that at the very least brightens its surroundings. It is not, it should also be said, anything to do with cutting hair, but only carries the name of a business long gone from the premises.

It is designed by the young architectural practice Brisco Loran, whose directors Thom Brisco and Pandora Loran helped to build it with their own hands – living on site without a shower as they did so – and who for now live and work there. It is also the creation of its owner, Duncan Blackmore, a man who professes a love for small spaces and a belief in the vital contribution of their “idiosyncrasy and asymmetry” to the life of cities and towns. He puts his ideas into practice with a series of controlled architectural explosions in various parts of Britain.

He is most easily described as a property developer, but he balks at the description: he wonders if “urban practitioner” might be better. Now 44, Blackmore grew up in progressive housing co-operatives in east London and had a precocious career in the art world (at the auctioneer’s Bonhams from 16, and an independent dealer at 22) before moving on to buying and improving buildings. He cites as influences the contemporary art he saw in east London galleries, and works such as Michael Landy’s Break Down (2001), in which the artist systematically and publicly destroyed everything he owned.

Arrant Land, a company he runs with shareholders additional, has built intriguing houses in south London and Whitstable, and recently won planning permission for making homes out of a church hall in Tunbridge Wells. Blackmore is a co-founder of Neighbourhood, a research and development company that is currently working on a project in Bootle, Merseyside, for helping care-leavers achieve independent living. Under the name of Arrant Industries, he undertakes a series of collaborations with architects and builders, that create such things as Kiosk in Glasgow, “a micro-civic space” dedicated to community uses, and Ferguson, a tiny flat in the same city with more architectural invention than you see in some skyscrapers.

Costa’s Barbers, another Arrant Industries project, also packs a lot into its 54 square metres. It presents a remade shopfront to the street that has depth and substance, a beautifully wrought yellow-painted work of joinery with multiple moving parts: sliding sashes that open up the interior, and panels with patterns of opaque glass by the art studio Pavilion Pavilion that can be lowered to provide privacy. Behind is a tiled front room, currently functioning as an office, next to a raised cooking area whose dish racks are somehow inspired by those in the colossal kitchens at Lutyens’s monumental Castle Drogo in Devon. A few steps more lead to a shower room and two bedrooms, which, due to risk of flooding from the nearby Thames, have to be a certain height above ground level.

Complexity is embraced. (The avoidance of it, says Blackmore, “is one of the most damaging impulses, driven by intellectual laziness and fear of the unknown”.) The street follows the winding stream of the now-hidden Falcon Brook, which means that few walls on the interior are parallel or perpendicular, and the patterns of tiles and boarding clash and misalign. A pier to the left of the street elevation is decorated with leftover tiles that look like a remnant of some previous frontage – “we stored our waste on the facade”, says Brisco. An awning can be wound out to a depth of three metres, such that cafe tables may be placed on the street.

A cornice at the top of the shopfront is made of the salvaged legs of a snooker table, quartered lengthwise, and panelled dados inside come from the backs of old pews. The back of the shop/flat/office, facing on to a rear yard, is almost another project in itself, with a shallow relief of white planes distantly inspired by Ben Nicholson, mirrors that seem to dissolve the wall, and panels of stones and glass fragments collected on lockdown walks along the Thames foreshore.

“I’m a planning geek and love a bit of risk,” says Blackmore, and Costa’s Barbers, like many of his projects, is the outcome of his artistry with rules and regulations. A lot of the pleasure it gives also comes from its making being made visible, which reflects his and the architects’ hands-on approach. He, too, got involved in the construction. The shopfront was made by RP Joinery, a company 500 yards from Blackmore’s home in Whitstable that he has known for 15 years, which enabled him to discuss the details as it was being made.

He calls Costa’s Barbers a “useful, adaptable, enriching thing”. It exhibits life and allows connections. It suggests future activities that may or may not come to pass. There are no immediate plans to sell things through the windows, but it could happen. It won’t be easy to replicate elsewhere the intense input that went into it, but the project sets out an important principle, that anything built on any high street should give something to its surroundings. It’s a good deed in a naughty world.