The £40m development at 82 Mount Street in west London is a boutique 10,000 sqft scheme to convert an end of terrace mansion into basement office space, ground floor retail and five upper floors of apartments.
The developer is Redd, owned by Monaco property tycoon Jacopo Marzocco, and 82 Mount Street is being specifically marketed as having Covid-19 safeguarding and homeworking features.
The concierge desk in the lobby will be set well back to allow for social distancing rules and the latest technology will be applied to the design of the entire development to minimise physical touch points as much as possible.
Passenger lifts are designed to be ‘no touch’, using contactless fobs and pre-programming IT to ensure that only residents and authorised guests have access to the private apartment floors.
To facilitate working from home, the apartments will be fitted out with a 600mm deep desk space to accommodate a professional work-station set-up, not just a 400mm writing desk for a laptop.
The developer is also considering air filtration systems for the apartments and contactless fobs and voice recognition systems to provide apartment owners with access to both the main entrance to the development and their private apartments. It is also says that is ‘looking to make finishes and surfaces from anti-viral materials’. It says that it might use copper for key touch point surfaces because the Covid-19 virus has been shown to survives for only four hours on it, compared to three days for other finishes such as steel.
With development management by Red, the project team includes Formation Architects and Savills as planning consultant
Construction work to redevelop the property is expected to start in autumn 2020 with build completion scheduled for late 2021.
Fronting onto Mount Street and Balfour Place, the mansion building at 82 Mount Street was originally designed in 1891 by Eustace Balfour, the Grosvenor Estate’s architect-in-residence, and built in 1892-1894 in an Anglo-Dutch style in red brick with grand stone entrance portico, projecting bays, stone dressings and Dutch gables.
Originally a single mansion, between 1948 and 1984 it was the international headquarters of the Greek-owned London & Overseas Shipping Line. Over the last three decades the building provided multi-let premises.
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