Costa’s Barbers

by Brisco Loran and Arrant Industries

Client Duncan Blackmore

Award RIBA London Award 2025 and RIBA London Small Project of the Year Award 2025

The award winner tells us: "Costa’s Barbers is a shop on Battersea High Street remade as a space for living, work, and trade. The works have transformed a vacant retail space into a flexible home that retains a meaningful connection to its historical commercial setting. Undertaken as a collaborative project between Brisco Loran and Arrant Industries, the team are the project’s designers, builders, and clients, with Brisco Loran now occupying the space as its first keepers.

Provoked and enabled by an expansion of contentious permitted development rights, and with concern for their impact on the character of our high streets, the project explores how domestic life need not retreat towards the private, but might instead join with commercial activity, enriching the permeable and dynamic public nature of our street life.

The project is characterised by a very public yellow-painted timber shopfront, and a private whitewashed composition amongst the familiar brick backs of London."

The jury says: "The jury saw how pragmatic constraints such as external meter locations informed the internal arrangement of the bedrooms and design of the rear façade. A determination to pursue circularity through the reuse of materials and the minimisation of waste informed the overall character of the project and created many of the moments of humour and delight. The shopfront façade is particularly ingenious, with remade sash windows able to be configured for varying levels of openness and privacy through making the most of some innovative techniques of patterned glass-making."

Read the full citation from the RIBA Awards Jury on RIBA Journal

Contractor Brisco Loran and Arrant Industries

Co-designer Brisco Loran and Arrant Industries

Glass artist Pavilion Pavilion

Structural engineer Elite Designers

Gross internal area 54m²