Aluminium windows and louvres, Heal's, Tottenham Court Road

Heal's has stood on Tottenham Court Road since the shop was built around it, and the refurbishment kept the store trading while the floors above became offices. We worked on the courtyard elevations at first and second floor level: four large fixed Sheerline Prestige aluminium windows, a single Prestige door, two fixed heritage aluminium windows and six bespoke aluminium louvres.

The two heritage windows replaced openings that had been stripped out earlier in the programme, when the building needed a way to get materials and plant inside. That is a common enough sequence on a refurbishment and it leaves you fitting a finished window into an opening that has been working as a doorway for months.

We were appointed through the main contractor, who we have worked with on a long run of projects, and part of what we were asked for was help finalising the design rather than just a price against a drawing. The brief was sleek and contemporary, and the harder half of it was making the new aluminium sit properly against a building that was already there: getting the different finishes and profiles to read as one intention rather than as three separate orders. The windows and door are RAL 9005 Jet Black; the louvres are a golden brown, IGP-HWF Classic 519T.

The work ran in stages across about six months, reached from scaffold the main contractor provided. It was an active construction site throughout and nobody was occupying the floors we were working on, which makes for a straightforward programme by London standards: the constraint was sequence and access rather than working around people.