Retail and Commercial Architects in Birmingham and the West Midlands
With 15+ years’ experience designing stores and commercial premises, our team have the expertise to help you open your new branch on time – even in tricky locations.
Professional design and planning with fast service for commercial clients
As retail and commercial architects, we have often been asked to work with difficult sites where a standard retail or commercial solution has been unacceptable. We commonly meet and work with Planning Officers and / or Conservation Officers across the West Midlands to create or refurbish a building individual to the site but still meets the client or developer needs.
The well-known German supermarket brand Lidl has been a frequent client of ours in recent years, and we have worked on several stores around the West Midlands, including in Alum Rock and further afield in Bath, where we revitalised a listed building to make a local shopping landmark – you can find out more about our work with Lidl here.
Heritage and listed building expertise for retail developments
In an outstanding project in a beautiful part of the south-west, we worked in close collaboration with Chase Homes and the local authority to design the redevelopment of the former Gordon Russell Works. This land, home to a former factory, was set in the picture-perfect Cotswold village of Broadway.
The site was incredibly complex, and our expert team gradually evolved the design through considerable consultation with the local planning authority and English Heritage, and its location in a conservation area and an AONB.
The mixed-use development for the village sought to bring financially sustainable housing and a renewed commercial vitality to Broadway, and included retail, commercial and residential accommodation including the design of a supermarket for the community located around a brand new, fully landscaped town square clad in the famous honeyed Cotswold stone.
Back in Birmingham, another of our projects as retail and commercial architects involved refurbishing a parade of shops in the busy suburb of Moseley. These buildings consisted of a mixture of shops and offices, all in a very poor state of repair caused by lacking maintenance and neglect – but all in a prime location with plenty of economical potential
Located in the heart of Moseley Village and the adjacent conservation area, the brief for this project was a mixture of new build residential and conversion, and also retail space for Sainsbury’s in addition to office space.
Leisure and hospitality projects
At Quorn Grange Hotel in the East Midlands, we designed a new extension to this popular hotel, as well as a contemporary new nursery, mewshouses and refurbished an office block, providing financial stability to make sure that Quorn Grange can carry on its fantastic educational work well into the future.
One of the more unusual projects came up at Longford Marina, near Coventry, where our brief was to design a use for a patch of unused land that was problematic for the local community – so we designed a 225-berth marina and light industrial park with a selection of cottage-style homes and workshops to provide employment, housing and leisure for the local community.
We also worked on refurbishing the prestigious Michelin-starred restaurant Simpsons, creating a new orangery for diners, as well as staff and guest accommodation in this listed building in Edgbaston – one of our most impressive and visible projects.
From these projects, you can see that our experience in retail and commercial architecture has focussed on mid-scale mixed-use developments in suburban and semi-rural settings as a sustainable way to integrate the different needs of residents, workers and developers. These complex projects are a real test of our expertise and knowledge, but have given us a fantastic portfolio of work.
If you have a commercial or retail project in the West Midlands that you’re looking to get off the ground, come to Lapworth Architects. Give us a call on 0121 455 0032 and see how we can help you get a fantastic return on your investment.