Flat for sale in Summers Street, London EC1R

This apartment lies in the Manhattan Loft Corporation’s first London warehouse conversion, which subsequently set the standard for loft living in the city. Interiors gesture towards the building’s industrial heritage with exposed brick walls, concrete ceilings and Crittall steel windows that provide wonderful city views. The excellent bars, restaurants and cafés of Clerkenwell and Farringdon are mere minutes on foot from Summers Street.

The Building

With a white façade and ribbons of Crittall windows, the building is a distinctive feature of Clerkenwell. The grand five-storey art deco warehouse – originally a printworks – was designed in the 1930s by Stanley Peach, the architect behind Wimbledon’s historic Centre Court.

In 1992, the Manhattan Loft Corporation commissioned award-winning architect Piers Gough to reimagine the building for residential development. With the integrity of its original design in mind, it was subsequently reconfigured to include 23 individual apartments, each with a unique footprint and a feel that set the standard for loft living in London. Radically, the first owners were invited to divide the space up according to their needs.

The Tour

The impressive building is entered via an enclosed courtyard. Bold red signage synonymous with the development signifies the residential apartments, while a private underground car park with a car lift is past a towering curved wall of glass bricks. This apartment has an allocated parking space.

This apartment is on the third floor, accessed via lift. Soaring ceilings create a lofty sense of volume upon entry, while steel-framed, double-glazed windows flood the plan with natural daylight. The current owner has built a smart bench seat that runs below the window, creating a wonderful spot to sit and enjoy views over Clerkenwell towards the Ziggurat Building. The seat seamlessly links the raised floor areas at either end, allowing all services to run underneath and out of sight, keeping pipes and cables hidden away. The raised areas also allow for built-in uplighting. Exposed concrete beams and pillars add further texture, with a pullout office/desk space neatly concealed within built-in storage. All wood throughout the flat is solid maple.

A few steps up on one side of the plan is the contemporary kitchen, where there is also space for a dining area. The kitchen makes use of a fresh palette characterised by steel worktops and timber cabinetry. Workbenches wrap around the rear of the room in a u-shape, ensuring the space remains social to the dining and living areas beyond. A unique approach to maximising storage can be found in the nine underfloor drawers hidden within the steps here, each 8ft long. This means that suitcases, vacuum cleaners and so forth can be tucked away out of sight but easily accessed for day-to-day use.

On the opposite side of the plan is the bedroom, which is divisible from the living spaces by solid maple folding doors. Exposed brick works in careful harmony with generous warehouse windows to create a space that is at once warm, cocooning and bright. Galvanised steel shutters create shade at night time. There is a full wall of built-in wardrobes for storage, as well as further storage to be found in the bathroom behind.

Area Guide

Summers Street is superbly situated just north of Farringdon, east of Bloomsbury and close to the peaceful green space of Coram’s Fields. It is within the Hatton Garden Conservation Area, designed to protect the area’s historic character and its many “robustly detailed industrial, commercial and residential buildings of the late 19th to mid-20th centuries”.

Clerkenwell was recently named the London winner of The Sunday Times Best Places to Live 2024. With the building sitting behind Farringdon Street, restaurants like The Eagle (the first gastro pub in London), the much-loved Moro and the original outpost of Caravan can be counted among the excellent local offerings.

Leather Lane beckons in the other direction. It has a brilliant mid-week street food market, where great coffee options include Profrock and Attendant Coffee Roasters. Laidback Lamb’s Conduit Street, with its independent restaurants and boutiques, is less than a 10-minute walk away; favourites here include the culinary institution Ciao Bella and the celebrated wine bar Noble Rot. The Brunswick Centre, a Grade ii-listed masterpiece is a five-minute cycle away and is home to a large Waitrose supermarket and Curzon cinema. The world-famous theatres of Soho and Covent Garden are also within walking distance, as are Sadlers Wells Theatre and the Barbican‘s arts centre.

We’ve written about our Clerkenwell recommendations in greater depth in our Journal.

Farringdon Station is a nine-minute walk and is serviced by the Hammersmith and City, Circle, and Metropolitan and Elizabeth Underground lines, as well as National Rail. For the City, Liverpool Street is five minutes away by tube, while Heathrow can be reached in around 35 minutes. International rail travel connects to Europe from nearby St Pancras and several bus routes run along neighbouring streets in all directions, including neighbouring Islington.

Tenure: Share of Freehold
Lease Length: Approx. 999 years remaining
Service Charge: Approx. £3,600 per annum
Council Tax Band: E