Aluminium windows, Headrow Court, Leeds

Headrow Court sits opposite Leeds Town Hall, and until recently it was four separate office buildings. The main contractor took the scheme on as a £12.5m, sixteen month conversion into 108 purpose built student studios with reception, study and dining space, finishing in October 2025.

The facade was replaced rather than patched, and our part of that was the aluminium windows. On a city centre building of this age that is less about the product and more about the openings: four buildings that were never built to match, brought into one elevation, with the window line expected to read as one thing from the street.

The projecting bays are the part people notice. They wrap the corner of the building in dark framing above the shopfronts, and they are the reason the elevation reads as a single new building rather than four old ones stitched together. Behind them, every studio needed a window that opens safely, keeps street noise down and holds heat in a building now lived in all year rather than occupied nine to five.

The wider scheme connects to the Leeds Pipes district heating network and diverted 98% of its site waste from landfill. That is the contractor's achievement rather than ours, but it is the kind of scheme our commercial work tends to sit inside: an existing building kept and upgraded instead of demolished.