Bournville Place location: Birmingham

Client: Cadbury Trebor Basset Project: Bournville Place Location: Bournville, Birmingham Size: 14355m2 The dining hall at the centre of the Cadbury’s Bournville Chocolate factory has been transformed into a state of the art office facility for 700 employees through work by Weedons working as executive architects alongside Stanton Williams. The project provides office floor plates with raised access floors accommodating state of the art comfort cooling, electrical, voice and IT services providing an interior that can be adjusted to different work patterns. This includes flexible meeting spaces, which are capable of being combined to provide a 100-seat seminar room, catering facilities providing a minimum of 500 covers in two sittings and a generous ‘Cadbury Café’ within the main atrium area. This project has created a first class flexible office building with an elegant and functional main entrance dramatic atria and light-wells that draw natural daylight into the deep office space.

Design Process Stanton Williams were commissioned in 2003 to create a new headquarters building for Cadbury at their historic Bournville site in Birmingham, by using the old dining hall that had fallen into a state of disrepair. Completed in 2007 the building’s potential has been unlocked, creating a flexible, sustainable and inspiring working environment, suitable for the changing needs of a major global business. The practice was appointed to develop a scheme for the dining block’s remodeling, completed at a cost of £30 million. The project represents a highly intrusive piece of surgery: much of the building’s interior was scooped out and it’s elevations dramatically adjusted. The building is unlisted and had it not been for the fact that it lies within a conservation area; there might have been a strong case to make for its demolition. The building’s central section was replaced with a new block whose frontage combines full-height glazed openings and slender brick piers to create a striking visual effect. The simple stone portico gives Cadbury a ‘front door’ for the first time, framed by the retained end sections of the 1920s building. The mix of old and new is present throughout for example the use of blue bricks on the leading corners of the piers, a subtle decorative detail that features both on the pilasters and window openings of the existing building. The aim of the project has obviously been to maintain a reading of the building as a single entity. Internally, the emphasis has been on flexibility, with open-plan working areas being punctuated by meeting rooms and informal social spaces, which are of an epic scale. The design demands an open relationship between the offices and other spaces with the effect that the whole environment is one unobstructed space. Of the original design the only façade which communicated a sense of openness was the west elevation, designed in response to the adjacency of the men’s recreation ground it was glazed extensively and long balconies were carried across its upper two levels. The ground floor dining room had a deep terrace which compromised the interior spaces and has therefore been removed and the lower ground floor previously used for changing rooms has been converted into the new dining area recreating a terrace at the lower level.

The elevations have been adjusted dramatically opening up the south facing street frontage with an abundance of glazing permitting view and light deep into the floor plates. This elevation represents the front face of a new structure that extends through the full depth of the building, the retention of two existing walls forming bookends. The success of the project has been recognised by achieving a number of Awards:

RIBA Awards - West Midlands - Winner

British Council for Office Awards - Regional Corporate Workplace - Winner

Civic Trust Award