The Standard, London: The Council’s Own Architects Built This First

Design Travel · King’s Cross

Reading Time: 8 minutes

The Standard, London occupies a 1973 Camden council office block designed by the same borough architect’s department responsible for the estates now studied and listed around the world. André Balazs, whose own hotel brand began with a remodelled 1960s motel on the Sunset Strip, has form for exactly this kind of second life.

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Introduction

The Standard, London occupies the former Camden Town Hall Annexe on Euston Road, directly opposite St Pancras station, and opened in July 2019 as the Standard Hotels brand’s first property outside the United States. The hotel has 266 rooms and suites, three restaurants, a bar and a recording studio. The building’s exterior refurbishment and extension were led by Orms, working with the structural engineers Heyne Tillett Steel. The interiors are by Shawn Hausman Design, working with the London studio Archer Humphryes Architects. The developer was André Balazs Properties, in partnership with Crosstree Real Estate Partners.

Most coverage of the hotel treats the building’s Brutalist shell as a striking backdrop and leaves it there. What gets skipped is who actually designed that shell, and why it existed in the first place: this was not a speculative 1970s office block that happened to look interesting. It was the borough of Camden’s own annexe, designed in-house by the architects’ department that gave the borough some of the most significant council housing built anywhere in Britain.

The council’s own department built this

The Annexe was designed by Camden Council’s Borough Architect’s Department, under Sydney Cook, in 1970, and completed between 1973 and 1977. Cook led that department through the period now referred to as Cook’s Camden, a run of council housing schemes, including the Alexandra Road Estate and Branch Hill, that broke with conventional post-war housing and are today studied internationally and, in several cases, listed. The department’s ambition was not confined to housing. The Town Hall Annexe was the same office, working in the same idiom, building for the council itself: a precast concrete frame, a waffle-slab structure and the distinctive rounded rectangular window bays that still define the building’s facade.

That context changes what the building is. It is not an anonymous product of 1970s municipal budgeting, dressed up by a hotel brand for atmosphere. It is a specific, credited work by the architects’ office responsible for some of the most celebrated social housing of the period, built as the department’s own headquarters rather than for tenants, and it has spent the decades since Camden vacated it in relative obscurity, unlisted and unremarked, while its housing schemes down the road became case studies.

From the demolition shortlist to a five-star hotel

Camden Council moved out of the Annexe in 2012, and the building sat vacant while the site went out to bid. Competing developers pitched demolition and a new build. Orms won the commission by arguing for adaptive reuse instead. As the client has put it, “nobody else looked at it as a refurb as opposed to a knock down and rebuild.” André Balazs has said much the same about the building on its own terms: “It’s exactly flawless, a great 1970s building.” The Twentieth Century Society, which engages when postwar buildings face demolition, supported the conversion route over rebuilding.

That the case for saving the building had to be made at all says something about how unlisted postwar civic buildings are generally treated. This one survived because a developer chose reuse as a commercial strategy rather than a heritage obligation, which is a more fragile basis for preservation than statutory listing, though the result here is the same.

What Orms kept, and what it added

Orms retained the precast concrete panels and the waffle-slab ceiling structure, which is now visible, painted white, inside a number of the guest rooms rather than concealed behind a suspended ceiling. The original smoked and tinted glazing was replaced with clear glass, reopening views the building had effectively hidden for forty years, and the rounded window frames were rebuilt to the original profile. Three additional floors were added above the existing structure, threaded onto new steel columns, stepped back from the facade in deference to the Grade I-listed St Pancras station opposite. The most visible single addition is a red external shuttle lift, run up the building’s flank, which functions as the hotel’s most photographed piece of signage without a sign on it.

The sustainability figures are not incidental to the story either. The project uses grey-water recycling and waste-water heat recovery, and the completed building runs at roughly 60 per cent below the RIBA carbon benchmark for its type, a genuinely strong figure for a project built around retaining an existing concrete frame rather than starting from a slab. Retaining Cook’s department’s original structure was, among other things, the more efficient route to that number. The project won a RIBA London Award and a RIBA National Award in 2021.

Shawn Hausman and Archer Humphryes built the interiors as a deliberate contrast

Where the building’s exterior argument is about restraint, respecting a serious piece of civic Brutalism, the interior argument by Shawn Hausman Design and Archer Humphryes is the opposite. Hausman has described the approach directly: “We were a bit more colourful than usual, setting those main colours, and then playing off what we’d call a disruptor, something that’s a little off.” Guest rooms carry flecked cobalt-blue carpet, plum upholstered window seats, bright red wardrobes with recessed semi-circular handles, and bathrooms tiled in striped black and pink with mint-green fixtures. Rooms without natural light are given faux blinds designed to simulate daylight, a deliberately artificial, 1970s-referencing fix to a genuine problem inherited from the building’s original deep office floor plates. Several suites have outdoor bathtubs positioned to look directly across at St Pancras.

The reception carries the building’s single most significant piece of applied art: a turquoise ceramic tile wall by the artist Lubna Chowdhary, patterned with dark blue and deep red circles, set behind a grooved timber service counter. Chowdhary, a Royal College of Art graduate whose practice works across sculpture, architecture and craft, has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery and the V&A. Her tilework at the Standard is a considered response to a Brutalist concrete lobby rather than a decorative afterthought: colour and pattern doing the work that the original architecture, built for administrative circulation rather than arrival, was never designed to do.

Even the library kept its name

The hotel’s food and drink programme runs across several floors rather than concentrating in one signature room, and one detail continues the building’s own habit of keeping what it finds. The ground floor lounge, a book-lined space used for informal seating and work, is called The Library Lounge, because the room occupies the site of a former Camden Council public library. The hotel’s small broadcast studio, Sounds Studio, sits inside that same room. Upstairs, Double Standard runs as the all-day bar and restaurant, built around what is reported to be the second-longest bar counter in the country. On the tenth floor, reached by the red external lift, Decimo is run by the Michelin-starred chef Peter Sanchez-Iglesias, serving Mexican cooking filtered through his own Spanish family background. Isla, a wine-led restaurant with a weatherproofed garden terrace, and The Rooftop, a seasonal eleventh-floor bar on artificial turf with panoramic skyline views, sit above that. A late-night bar, Sweeties, runs into the small hours. The naming pattern is consistent with everything else in this project: the library stayed a library in spirit, even after everything around it changed use.

A brand built on the same trick, twice

There is a second layer to this story that most coverage misses because it treats the London hotel as a one-off. André Balazs built the entire Standard Hotels brand on exactly the manoeuvre being repeated here. The first Standard, which opened on the Sunset Strip in 1999, was a remodelled 1962 motel, the former Thunderbird, bought and reworked rather than demolished and replaced. Balazs sold an 80 per cent stake in the company in 2013, and Standard International has since expanded the brand into a second act built around exactly the same instinct: find an unglamorous, structurally sound building from the recent past, keep its bones, and give it a new use its original architects never imagined. The Standard, London is the international expression of a strategy Balazs has now been running for two decades, applied this time to a British borough’s own civic architecture rather than an American motor lodge.

What the design argument actually is

Strip the story back to its two structural decisions and the pattern is consistent. Orms treated Cook’s department’s concrete frame as worth keeping rather than clearing, and Hausman and Archer Humphryes treated that same frame as a backdrop confident enough to take real colour rather than requiring apology or camouflage. Both decisions rest on the same underlying judgement: that a serious, well-built piece of 1970s civic architecture does not need to be disguised as something else to work as a five-star hotel. It needed clear glass, three storeys and a red lift, not a different building.

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Final thoughts

The Standard, London works because two separate acts of restraint were made in the same direction. A council architect’s department built something more considered than its brief strictly required in the 1970s, and, decades later, a developer and two design teams decided that fact was worth keeping rather than erasing. André Balazs has been making that same bet on unglamorous mid-century buildings since a converted motel on the Sunset Strip in 1999, and this is simply the largest and most historically loaded version of it yet.

What the hotel actually sells, underneath the coloured wardrobes and the ceramic wall, is Sydney Cook’s concrete frame, kept rather than cleared, dressed in a way confident enough not to need to hide it.