Collection · 9 houses

Houses where the art is load-bearing

Nine addresses in mill halls, dock warehouses and printworks, where you do not sleep beside a collection but inside one.

Some houses treat art as decor and hang it over the bed. These nine treat it as architecture: you cannot walk past it without changing your route.

The houses

Basalt · Brass · Shadow

Alder Yard

Former cotton mill, canal quarter

The rooms sit where the spools once ran, and the guests share a courtyard with four working studios. Anyone walking to breakfast passes an open door with someone behind it who started grinding at six. Art is not on the wall here; it stands in the way and you walk around it.

Architecture: Brick hall of 1901, steel windows, load-bearing columns left standing inside the rooms.
Interior: Bare concrete, beds built from workshop timber, curtains instead of doors at the bathrooms.
Atmosphere: Workshop noise on weekdays until seven, then a quiet you can actually hear.
Best for: Anyone who wants to sleep one night beside other people's work.

Courtyard access to four studios
Breakfast at one long table
Loan bicycles with a canal map
Quiet from ten, and they mean it

The detail

The stairwell holds the mill's colour register: 148 tiles, each a batch of yarn that no longer exists.

Ask us →

Charcoal · Zinc · Fog

Lightworks

Colliery office building, pithead district

An administrative block that lost its office partitions and kept its window rhythm. The collection consists of works made for this building, and none of them leave it. At night the new light well is bright enough that the corridors need no lamps.

Architecture: Brick and steel from the 1920s, a light well cut through five floors.
Interior: Coal-grey linoleum, basins cast in one piece, furniture from workshops nearby.
Atmosphere: Quiet verging on cool; the building asks you to slow down.
Best for: Travelling alone with a book and two free days.

Collection open around the clock
Workshop kitchen for guests
Walk through the pithead site on request
No television in the rooms

The detail

The window handles are original, and on three rooms the wear pattern tells you who liked to air them out.

Ask us →

Salt · Tar · Linen

Waterline

Warehouse on the dock, working harbour

A storage house whose loading hatches are now windows. The rooms run one behind the other like carriages, each facing a different slice of harbour. Lie awake here and you hear the cranes before you see them.

Architecture: Warehouse of 1908, the crane jib kept in place, floors on the original planking.
Interior: Plain berth construction, wool blankets, washstands in zinc sheet.
Atmosphere: Busy through the day, almost empty at first light.
Best for: Early risers, and anyone who prefers water that works to water that glitters.

Breakfast from half past five
Guest mooring at the jetty
Library on harbour history
Laundry handled in house

The detail

On the back wall a flood mark from 1962 is painted in white, and nobody has ever painted over it.

Ask us →

Lime · Ochre · Paper

Maple Hall

Merchant's house, old town edge

A building that stood empty for thirty years and whose plaster ceilings were stabilised rather than restored. The cracks stay visible and so do the paint layers beside them. Two rooms hold no pictures at all, because the walls say enough on their own.

Architecture: Nineteenth-century town house, exposed paint layers, a new stair in untreated oak.
Interior: Few pieces of furniture, tall windows, curtains in unbleached linen.
Atmosphere: Bright and dry, with the smell of old lime.
Best for: Guests who read decay as a material rather than a fault.

Walk-through on the building research
Breakfast with bread from the street
Two rooms reachable step-free
Quiet floor with no common room

The detail

Room four keeps a strip of 1911 wallpaper under glass, found the day the wall was opened.

Ask us →

Smoke · Copper · Moss

Fogroom

Hillside house above the tramway

A house on a slope into which the overhead line throws light twice a minute. Instead of blacking out the windows, the owners turned the beds so that you take the passing with you. The ground-floor collection changes four times a year; the stairwell never does.

Architecture: Slope house of 1955, three levels, unrendered concrete on the outside.
Interior: Dark timber, copper fittings, carpet only in the corridors.
Atmosphere: A faint rattle belongs to the place; after midnight it stops.
Best for: Two nights, when you want movement outside the window.

Changing collection on the ground floor
Guest kitchen until eleven
Four minutes on foot to the line
Rooms on the hill side with no track noise

The detail

From the top bathroom you see the car pass exactly once per bathtub filled.

Ask us →

Rust · Canvas · Grey

Beechworks

Shipyard hall, river frontage

A former yard hall with four timber volumes set inside it and no partitions added. Air is left between the rooms, and above all of it stands the old roof. Harbour noise arrives muffled, as if through a wall of water.

Architecture: Hall frame of 1937, inserted spruce cubes, no intermediate floor.
Interior: Plywood, canvas curtains, lamps hung on steel cable.
Atmosphere: Wide and cool, pleasantly draughty in summer.
Best for: Guests who would rather live in a room than in a bedroom.

Workbench for guests in the hall
Breakfast in the cube or on the quay
Store for bicycles and boats
Heat mats under the beds in winter

The detail

The hall has no clock; you measure the day by the strip of light crossing the floor.

Ask us →

Concrete · Mustard · Dust

Silver Poplar

Corner building with a working printworks

A corner house whose ground floor has been a print shop for forty years and has stayed one. Seven rooms sit above it, hung with prints made downstairs. Ask, and you may watch a proof being pulled, though not touch it.

Architecture: Residential building of 1898, shopfront intact, courtyard wing newly roofed.
Interior: Mustard doors, floorboards stripped back, shelving to the ceiling.
Atmosphere: Smelling of ink and paper, though not in the rooms.
Best for: Anyone who wants to watch a craft instead of reading about one.

Proof pulled on request
Breakfast in the shop unit
Library of specimen books
Supper on request

The detail

Every guest leaves with a sheet left over from setting up the press that morning.

Ask us →

Willow · Pewter · Evening

Bankside Light

Counting house on the canal

A canal building that its owner turned from an exhibition space into a hotel after twelve years. The rooms keep their hanging rails, and guests may bring along whatever they want to show. In the evening the water doubles the façade and makes it twice as tall.

Architecture: Counting house of 1925, façade to the canal, an overgrown garden at the back.
Interior: Hanging rails in every room, white walls, chairs left from the exhibition years.
Atmosphere: Informal; you fall into conversation with the next room quickly.
Best for: Travellers who make something themselves and want to hang it up.

Hanging rails free to use
Canoes at the jetty
Breakfast until eleven
Garden with a fire pit

The detail

The corridor holds a list of every work guests have hung since opening and taken home again.

Ask us →

Slag · Oak · Fire

Pinewick

Works housing between two mill walls

A house wedged between two factory walls, warmed from an old district line, with rooms named after the coking plant that stood here. The works inside were made by people whose families lived on this street. It is not a museum but an address with a memory.

Architecture: Works housing of 1912, clinker brick, new south-facing openings.
Interior: Oak, enamel, a slag-stone face left exposed in the hall.
Atmosphere: Warm and dense; the best house in this collection in winter.
Best for: Guests who prefer history in conversation to history on labels.

Open kitchen in the evening
Sauna in the basement
Estate archive in the reading room
Two rooms sized for families

The detail

The door numbers are cast from melted slag, and no two of them are alike.

Ask us →

Tell us your city and your taste

Write and say where you are going and what interests you about a building. We answer with two or three addresses from the guide, and we say which of them we would book again ourselves.

Write to the desk →