Albert Mill

Working with Urban Splash, I designed fifteen loft apartments from 2008 to 2012, in the Grade II listed Albert Mill in Castlefield, Manchester. Each apartment was designed as a bespoke response to the raw shell of the mill — exposed timber ceilings, cast iron columns, brick walls and industrial-scale windows — rather than a repeated template imposed across the building.

The raw shells are extraordinary spaces. Massive timber beams and floorboards overhead, brick walls with deep-set industrial windows, and slender cast iron columns that once carried the weight of cotton machinery. The design approach was to let the existing fabric dominate — to insert the new domestic elements as precise, self-contained objects set against the roughness of the mill.

The apartments read as a series of distinct rooms within the open mill floor — living spaces where the full height and grain of the original structure is always present. Brick, timber and iron set the tone. The new interventions — kitchens, bathrooms, bedroom partitions — sit within this as clean, precisely detailed elements. The contrast between old and new is deliberate and unresolved. Neither dominates.

The bespoke kitchen I designed for one of the apartments features in the Urban Splash book Transformation. The kitchen joinery uses a stepped, interlocking panel system — the door and drawer fronts break away from conventional grid lines, creating a composition that reads as a single sculptural surface rather than a series of units. A strip of exposed brick between the upper and lower cabinets is backlit, bringing warmth and texture into the heart of the working surface.

Every apartment in Albert Mill is different. The shells vary — some have arched windows, others rectangular. Some face the canal, others the courtyard. The column grid shifts. Rather than fight these irregularities with a standard layout, each apartment was designed from the inside out, working with the specific conditions of its shell. The result is fifteen individual homes within one building, each with its own character, united by a shared material language and a respect for the mill's original fabric.