Chiswick House Cafe

Chiswick House Café is sited in an environmentally and politically sensitive area within the curtilage of the Grade I listed landscape conceived by Lord Burlington and William Kent. It is part of the Chiswick House and Gardens regeneration project and is partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Inspired by classical Palladian architecture, the simple and contemporary single storey building is well suited to its setting. Its concrete frame is both white and fair-faced and incorporates Portland stone piers which form a colonnade for external covered seating along its main elevations. The café is built over the footings of a significant earlier building and, to minimise its impact on this archaeology, a new concrete raft supports the new structure.

Gifford worked closely with the architect Caruso St John and the client English Heritage to achieve a high quality and carefully detailed structure which can be enjoyed by visitors to the park.

The concrete roof slab soffit and shear walls have been exposed to increase the thermal mass of the building. Inside, the main seating area is glazed with full height windows to increase the natural daylight entering the building and the external covered walkway provides effective shading to the glazing. The internal and external slabs are thermally broken to minimise heat loss from the building.

• Structural and conservation engineering
• Below ground drainage

• Landscape Institute Awards 2010 – Heritage and Conservation category; highly commended
• Civic Trust Awards 2011 – Award winner
• RIBA London Awards 2011 – London Region Building of the Year Award; winner.
• RIBA London Awards 2011 –The English Heritage Award for Sustaining the Historic Environment; winner.
• RIBA London Awards 2011 – Arts and Leisure category; winner

An article from Concrete in which Gifford’s Peter J Corbett and James Miller describe the construction of Chiswick House Café can be found here. (Reproduced by kind permission of The Concrete Society.)

Related project - Chiswick House Gardens, Classic Bridge