Diageo

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Value £1.5m | Type CAT A Fit Out | Interior Designer MCM

Diageo is known globally as a high-quality drinks company. Owner of brands that range from Guinness, Baileys and Pimm’s, though to Bell’s, Johnny Walker and Lagavulin, the company’s distilleries are responsible for producing 40% of the world’s scotch whisky.

In 2021, Diageo moved its global HQ from Park Royal to 16 Great Marlborough Street in London’s Soho district. Known as Diageo 1HQ, the building’s new interiors were designed by MCM to cover 105,000 square feet. Created to be a destination where ‘workspace, brand, hospitality and experiences co-mingle and connect to create an inspiring new home’, the building won the 2023 BCO Regional and National Award for the Best Fit Out of Workspace.

 

MCM describes the project vision as being ‘to create a premium workspace that supported an inclusive and purpose led culture’. London Drywall played a key role in turning this vision into reality.

 

London Drywall’s contribution

 

We were responsible for a wide range of CAT A works during this major fit-out project. We installed a variety of performance drywall partitioning, including 120min integrity shaft walls, acoustic slab-to-slab meeting rooms, plus airtight data rooms with gas suppression systems. We also installed curved VR immersion experience spaces and structural framing systems. These housed live green-wall and plant feature finishes alongside large- scale AV systems.

 

London Drywall also helped the principal contractor and consultant teams to overcome an array of project challenges. These included:

 

  • Solving fire curtain corner junction issues. We designed, incorporated and constructed a bespoke, fire-rated pilaster system that accommodated the required fire curtain runners. These works took months of accurate site surveys, graphic model overlays and coordinated development.
  • Many shaft walls were required to crank and step between floors. This was linked to issues surrounding the proposed slab-cut locations for air filtration systems. We created a bespoke fire-rated steel /drywall structure to overcome these issues and prevent further project redesigns.
  • Some construction spaces spanned several stories or floors, requiring installations of structural and integral drywall more than 9m in height. In places these constructions also spanned the intersecting slab edges, so we developed horizontal slip joint detailing to accommodate the positive and negative deflection properties of the building structure.
  • The project included many curved feature walls, with radii varying from 650mm to as little as 280mm. These also housed both mid- and low-level shadow gap features, which ran throughout the perimeter of the rooms / office spaces. We designed, manufactured and installed pre-made GRG sections which accommodated these features, leaving a seamless finish once installed and jointed.

 

Our involvement in this major project lasted 16 months. In addition to the BCO Awards mentioned earlier, Diageo 1HQ also won the Mixology Project of the Year 2023.