East Street Mills

East Street Mills is a Grade II listed mill complex in Leeds, converted into rental apartments by Urban Splash. The building works — the fabric is sound, the apartments are occupied. But the communal experience of living here had been left behind. The entrances, corridors, courtyards and car park were functional but anonymous. Spaces you pass through without registering. The brief was to change that.

The design introduces a new layer of identity across all the shared spaces — from the moment you arrive by car to the moment you unlock your front door. A language of red, supergraphics and illuminated interventions that gives the building a collective presence it previously lacked.

The entrance is total immersion. Every surface — walls, floor, ceiling — is coated in vivid red epoxy. Strip lighting runs along the edges, glowing and guiding you through. It's a threshold, a resetting of the senses. You leave the street behind and enter the building already altered. Red is emotional, disruptive, inviting. It announces that something has changed here.

The car park is typically the most neglected communal space in any residential building. Here it becomes part of the design. Bold diagonal graphics in red and black wrap the walls, transforming a utilitarian concrete box into something with presence and energy. The same graphic language extends into the corridors. Each apartment door carries its number as a fractured supergraphic — red on white, white on red — so that arriving at your front door becomes an event rather than a routine.

The courtyards between the mill buildings are activated with new external elements. A long illuminated bench formed from a steel I-beam runs the length of the space — lit from beneath, it becomes a line of light at ground level. At one end a canopy structure provides sheltered seating, its angular steel frame holding a tensile fabric roof. At night the courtyard glows red, the light spilling across the brick and into the gaps between buildings. The dead space between the mills becomes the heart of the community.

Inside the apartments, the refurbishment introduces a clear material language. Birch ply kitchen units with clean, precise detailing sit against white walls and dark resin floors. The exposed steel deck ceiling and service runs are left visible — painted out but present, giving the apartments an honest industrial character. A single vertical red strip on each apartment wall acts as a subtle marker, tying each home back to the wider design language of the building. Every apartment is different but belongs to the same family.

The apartment kitchens are designed as freestanding objects within the open-plan space. The birch ply is left with its natural edge grain visible, the laminations creating a fine striped texture at the corners and junctions. It's an honest material — warm, tactile, and it improves with age. The kitchens sit beneath suspended upper cabinets that hover clear of the walls, maintaining the sense of openness and allowing the industrial ceiling to read as a continuous plane.