HOW TO DREAM BIG
THIS 10,000SQ FT HOME IS AN ODE TO THE OWNER’S LOVE OF INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE EMMA WELLS TAKES A LOOK AROUND...
WHATEVER you do, don’t call Stuart Holt a property developer. ‘You won’t catch me wearing widecollared shirts and driving a Range Rover,’ insists Stuart, the founder of Birmingham-based design and building company Javelin Block (javelinblock.com). Instead, you are more likely to find him in jeans and beanie, behind the wheel of a 1962 Land Rover.
Similarly, for Stuart, any talk of ‘luxury living’ and ‘price per square foot’ is absolute anathema – building integrity, craftsmanship and artistry are the values he admires most.
Since leaving the military and moving to Birmingham in 2005, Stuart has made a name for himself as a maverick on the city’s property scene. On long runs around the canal networks, his realisation that so many former industrial buildings lay unused and derelict was, for him, a kind of epiphany. These beautifully engineered buildings, he says, are hallowed spaces,
‘I was told it would make a good car park’
built by hard graft and which are still alive with the memories of the men and women who worked in them. ‘I saw they had a future that needed to be harnessed,’ he says.
With the founding of Javelin Block, he has turned his attention chiefly to Birmingham’s atmospheric Jewellery Quarter and Gun Quarter, authentically restoring and reanimating 1920s and 1930s former factories and industrial sites into edgy apartments, such as the Derwent Works and Comet Works schemes. All have as many of their original materials reused as possible, with concrete floors and metals such as brass, zinc, copper and steel, which age beautifully, featured liberally throughout.
But it’s Stuart’s most ambitious project to date, created to serve as his own, private retreat, that has caused the biggest stir. The Compound, on Water Street in the Jewellery Quarter, is not just a jawdropping 10,000sq ft home. With triple-height gabled ceilings soaring to 35 metres and panels of skylights it boasts three self-contained living spaces, an artist’s studio, office, speak-easy bar and a 25-seat cinema. It has also won a clutch of prestigious architectural accolades, including three RIBA awards and a spot on the shortlist for the Stephen Lawrence Prize in 2017, and was used as a shoot location for Ed Sheeran’s 2014 album, X.
Most gratifying of all for Stuart, however, was when Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg and his production team took the place over for nine days in 2016, using it to film key scenes in the blockbuster version of dystopian sci-fi novel Ready Player One.
‘It was incredible to have one of your icons sitting on your sofa,’ says Stuart, who bought the derelict former textiles factory in 2012. ‘And at the end of the day’s filming we would go down to the cinema to watch the latest rushes. I didn’t realise how the place would resonate with people – it was just somewhere I wanted to live.’
Considering the sheer scale of The Compound, it seems extraordinary that Stuart – who has two children that live overseas – had only ever envisaged it as a home, not a commercial space, or even a home office. ‘I work off my phone from pretty much anywhere,’ he says. ‘I really do use the whole place – although I think most people thought I was completely crazy when I took it on. The agent who showed it to me suggested it would make a good car park. But the whole point of Javelin Block is to show people how we can work with these historic buildings, not against them, and how to live in them.’
It’s certainly living large. Beyond a huge shutter and salvaged 1960s prison door lies a home of limitless possibilities. The building’s original steel frame has been exposed, with a new roof dropped on the top, and under-heated concrete floors poured
on. A beautifully engineered curtain of black, steel-framed Crittall windows spans the entire length of the groundfloor space, delineating the double-height inner courtyard from the residential areas. The huge volume of the warehouse – used over the years as a guitar-laminating workshop and a cannabis factory – is criss-crossed by walkways and bridges, with cosy, intimate spaces for lounging, working and reading carved out beneath.
A welder’s bench, serving as a kitchen island, is a focal-point for the largely openplan ground floor, and on an upper floor lies the main bedroom, with timber-clad walls. But most enchanting of all is a fully insulated, interior ‘winter garden’, with architectural greenery softening the industrial look.
However, much of The Compound has been furnished from Stuart’s incredible stash of old factory fittings, furnishing and machinery, salvaged from various projects and brought to him by locals keen to have them repurposed, and which he stores in a 20,000sq ft warehouse. ‘Some of the 3,000 or so industrial lights I’ve got are, quite literally, bomb proof,’ Stuart says. Copper lights from a decommissioned submarine hang in one of the white-tiled and brass-accented bathrooms.
Each period piece has its own unique story to tell, but Stuart – who also sculpts his own works – has mixed them up with contemporary street art, including a Banksy, and overscale, satirical prints of vintage Penguin book covers by Harland Miller. Among all the big names, though, his favourite is a drawing of an iPad sent to him by his young daughter. Despite acclaim for The Compound, Stuart has now put it on the market, for £2.75million, to focus on his next project: a 100-acre farm in the Oxfordshire countryside, where he is rebuilding the farmhouse and plans to rewild the land. ‘There is still so much untapped potential here,’ he says, ‘There are so many great buildings that need the right people to look after them.
‘We are only guardians, and if we do them right, they are going to last a lot longer than we are.’