Prestigiously located on Black Prince Road, a stone throw away from Westminster and the London Eye, the building is listed among English monuments and most clearly symbolises the Victorian Gothic style. This style inspired the Frost and Bluebottle agencies to breathe new life into the construction.
Like the exuberant terracotta decoration of the time, the Bluebottle agency naturally recommended Pyrolave enamelled lava for decorating the bar: the new agora of this highly connected place. The choice was realised through the expertise of Pyrolave which can offer strictly the same colour – Emerald in this project – between the counter tops and the trim of the vertical sections. Each top and tile was minutely designed to give the bar a perfect overall harmony, says Geoff Leach – sole distributor for Pyrolave UK.
The specific technical feature of this project lies in the ornamental shapes of the bar. These mouldings were obtained from lava blocks of the Volvic mountains, shaped by profile grinding on digitally controlled tools. Here, the picture rails are both horizontal and vertical, so Pyrolave engineers had to adapt the traditional manufacturing process to produce them in several sections while flat. The traditional mouldings evoking the Victorian style and the Emerald enamel applied to the Volvic lava give users a throwback in time within a prestigious and ultra-connected workspace.