We’ve posted many times about the redevelopment of Clapham Junction’s flagship building, the Arding & Hobbs department store – from the first plans, to updates on the works, and the latest finds in the building as the building work progressed. Under the ownership of real estate firm W.RE, work has advanced pretty well – and the last few weeks have seen quite a lot of the scaffolding come down, revealing the restored facade of the building.

Maybe the most noticed change has been the addition of two new storeys at the top – which have the unusual feature of being a giant golden crown! This is quite striking and has seen lots of attention – although the gold won’t be sticking around; it’s essentially the colour of new copper but has already started to go darker and will end up as a less prominent brown shade within a year or so.

This will accommodate a generously sized office space, including a roof terrace facing Lavender Hill, which is likely to be very popular with its occupiers.

We caught an unusual view of a large container of plants being craned up to the top of the building, where they will form part of the future roof garden! –

The (temporarily) golden crown is not especially visible from most angles – but does make an appearance when looking along the Falcon Road –

It does look pretty consistent with the original plans for the extension –

The entrance to the offices on the upper floors has also started to take shape on St Johns Road, with the girders to support a small canopy recently being installed, echoing (in a small way) the much larger 1970s one that was removed earlier in the works.

This will lead to a new office reception, in what was the ‘handbags & escalators’ bit of Debenhams. The plan had been to retain the escalators to preserve some of the classic ‘Department store’ look, albeit w have yet to see whether this remained the plan given the increasing electricity cost of running escalators all day; the store was originally designed with a grand staircase here and the escalators only came later.

The main facade is almost scaffolding-free, revealing the restored windows along the first floor. The corner entrance will be to a new pub / restaurant, the Albion & East, described as “Open all-day & late-night with early-morning coffee, brunch & hot-desking in the day to cocktails, wood-fired pizza & DJs at night and everything in-between“.

Round on Ilminster Gardens, the part of the building that had been looking particularly neglected has had a heavy duty cleanup – with the brickwork cleaned, most of the windows replaced with new ones with darker frames and double glazing. Many of these windows had been boarded over from the inside, but they have now been reopened to let light into the new office spaces on the upper levels.

One set of windows that hasn’t been replaced is the leaded glass on the upper ground floor, which us having some minor restoration works.

This is the same window before works started (thanks, as ever, to Google Street View) – showing how two of the stained glass panels that were completely missing have been recreated, and also how a load of pipes and clutter has been stripped from the wall to the right, and how a doorway that had been crudely bashed in to the right side of the window is being removed and replaced with leaded glazing! Few will notice this sort of detail round at the back of the building, but this is what sets a quality project apart from a ‘good enough’ one and we’re pleased to see it being done properly.

The other windows were previously in even worse condition, having had huge drainpipes bashed right through them, and big bits replaced with boards. We have reason to believe that the brown bit below the windows in the street view capture above used to also have elegant stained glass in it – indeed, some of the stained glass was still visible before the works started, shown below –

It’s hidden away behind the construction hoarding for now, but fingers crossed that this heritage glazing will also be restored during the works.

Meanwhile the space with the big windows up on the first floor of the building – which was the menswear department in the final year of Debenhams – had originally been envisaged as office space. We felt (and reported) at the time that the part closest to the Lavender Hill entrance would be better suited to a commercial use, with access from the pink arrow labelled ‘retail entrance 2’ in the diagram below – although W.RE at the time said they had not seen a lot of interest to take on first floor commercial units.

Well things changed, and the good news is that Third Space, one of the major tenants W.RE have already signed up, has taken space over three floors: most of the basement, the sort of mezzanine area that used to be the Debenhams ‘show boutique’ and then the ‘Joe and the Juice’ concession, but also a decent slice of the elegant first floor space – so this first floor will remain part of the Lavender Hill commercial space after all. We reported the Third Space signing back in March (with thanks to our ever-observant readers for the tip off!); they will be opening a large new gym and spa whose entrance will be at the corner pictured below, next to Nando’s.

It’s a sizeable investment for Third Space, who already run several similar venues in the City, and who are close to opening one in Wimbledon. It’s not Third Space’s only big investment in Battersea as they are also currently fitting out a large club by Battersea Power Station, due to open later this year. That one is based in the Gehry-designed buildings close to the tube, next to the recently-opened branch of Wagamama –

The Battersea Power Station venue is also large – our photo taken a couple of months ago as they were getting started on the internal fitout shows the scale of the site!

The new Third Space club at Arding & Hobbs will be designed by architects RHE, with an industrial design style. It will feature five studios, to host classes such as Reformer Pilates, Hot Yoga, a high-intensity studio with immersive light and sound, and a cycle studio. It will also have a track and rig area complete with assault bikes and ski ergs, and strength and cardio equipment. A separate part fo the club will have a wet spa with a sunken massage jet hydro-pool, cold plunge pool, steam room and a sauna whose walls are made of Himalayan sea salt; we’re not wholly sure how this is all being fitted in but the artists’ impression below gives a feel for the design approach this part of the club will be taking.

As the Battersea Society have noted, from the perspective of keeping a dynamic town centre at Clapham Junction that attracts the trade to support a wide mix of businesses, it’s a bit of a shame to see the plans for Arding & Hobbs’ shop space shift towards a members-only club, with the overall amount fo the building that passers by can visit on a ‘just drop in’ basis now rather smaller than what had been originally envisaged (where half the overall ground floor and a quarter of the basement would be for retail, and the rest for uses like office space and members’ clubs – this is now down to under a third of the ground floor and none of the basement). However this needs to be set against what is clearly a committed and high-quality restoration project for the building as a whole; and Third Space are a quality tenant who will both find a receptive local customer base, and establish a generally high threshold of quality for the development as a whole.

We have yet to see who is occupying the remaining office space on the upper levels, whose planed design is pictured above – and who is taking over the one remaining ground-floor shop unit (which had been linked to Amazon for one of their cashier-less stores, until they halted their UK expansion plans and pulled out – frankly maybe not a great loss). They may not be the most exciting tenant but we still suspect Boots may yet be interested, give they are planning a major rationalisation of their stores – and that at Clapham Junction they have one huge but not-ideally-located store whose lease expires in 2024, and one store a few doors down from Arding & Hobbs which is an odd layout and far too small to really work. As ever, we’ll keep you posted.

If you found this interesting, you may want to see our many previous articles on the Arding & Hobbs redevelopment, as well as our articles on retail and business topics in the Lavender Hill area.