Living inside a converted office building can signify all sorts of horrors, from striplighting and suspended ceiling tiles to badly converted, overcrowded homes. But an £18 million penthouse in the heart of Westminster bucks the trend.
There again, it hasn’t been converted from just any old office. The Gainsborough occupies one of four director’s offices in what was once Imperial Chemical House, the former HQ of industry giant ICI.
With MI5 next door, the Grade II-listed 9 Millbank development has a top spot Thameside, opposite Lambeth Bridge.
Walnut-panelled boardrooms have been turned into a four-bedroom duplex apartment with interior design from Katharine Pooley.
Architectural highlights include a 43-foot colonnade terrace overlooking the Thames, and a 17-foot domed ceiling that arches over what is now the principal bedroom suite.
The penthouse is the last of five properties in the converted building to come on the market, all in the former offices of ICI’s directors.
Founded in 1926, the British chemical company was once the country’s largest manufacture, and its headquarters at Millbank were established in 1928.
It was ICI chemists that discovered the now-ubiquitous material Perspex.
ICI was a part of the UK’s nuclear weapons programme during the Second World War; operation Tube Alloys was Britain’s version of the Manhattan Project.
The ICI also developed Dulux paint – although it is not thought the brand was used in the renovation of the Grade II-listed 1920s building given the preponderance of bespoke, hand-stitched Fromental wallpaper and Farrow & Ball paint in Pigeon.
Pooley, whose first interior design client was the late Mohammed Al-Fayed, commissioned the wallpaper with a pattern of peacocks with beaded feathers in reference to the carved birds on the building’s façade.
The blue-grey shade Pigeon was use for the principal bedroom, which features original timber columns.
Original herringbone parquet floors and carved doorframes were meticulously restored during the two-year renovation project.
“The building has so much character, I came to think of her as a beautiful, quintessentially English woman from a time gone by,” said Pooley.
“Her natural grace needing only the most elegant and linear of pieces to add a final touch of glamour to her innate and essential beauty.”
Future occupants of The Gainsborough, which is on the market through St Edward, will have access to a 24-hour concierge service that can arrange services such as restaurant reservations, at-home fine dining, and florists.
