Working in association with Professor Sir Colin Stansfield Smith, we won a limited competition for the design of a new John Lewis department store in Cambridge city centre which was to form the cornerstone of a new shopping mall designed by Chapman Taylor architects. The site was classified by English Heritage as one of the six most sensitive sites in the UK and we secured planning consent within eighteen months.

The design creates a wedge-shaped entrance atrium occupying a space between a four-storey ‘box’ onto Downing Street and a lower building onto St Andrew’s Street that acts as a ‘display box’.

The building is clad in a cream sandstone forming giant frames containing panels of patinated bronze fronted by a gunmetal framing that picks up on the scale and rhythm of the buildings along the street – a zinc-clad vaulted attic storey contains restaurants with great views over the Cambridge roofscape.

The building opened in December 2007.