Make Breakfast, Not War

London's Old War Office has been transformed into the city's most spectacular new hotel.

- Mark Ellwood

 

WHEN ARCHITECT GEOFF HULL first stepped onto this old government office site on London’s Whitehall eight years ago, he found it in a hazardous state. He stumbled on everything from waterlogged basement flooring to airconditioning ducts artlessly rigged down the centre of corridors, an ad hoc solution that had defaulted to permanent. The stringent historic protectionism he was tasked to work within, known in the UK as listing, had seemingly not been applied to the Old War Office (OWO), a landmarked Edwardian-era building commissioned in 1898 and, famously, Winston Churchill’s office during World War II. “I could see the grandeur, the importance, but it was disappointing—shocking, even—what the government had done to the building,” says Hull, a director at EPR Architects.