Ain’t no mountain high enough: Kuehne + Nagel x Mondrian London

Adaptive reuse may the buzzword de jour of the architectural world, but there’s a reason for it. It works. Repurposing existing structures not only offers creative opportunities for architects, it preserves the often much-loved existing fabric of our cities. Sustainability writ large.

Located on London’s Southbank, a stone’s throw from such august cultural institutions as Tate Modern and the National Theatre, Sea Containers House has seen change. Designed in 1974 as a hotel, upon completion in the 1980s it ended up being used as office space – and named after its primary tenant, Sea Containers.

When it came to repurposing three of the structure’s floors back into a hotel for the Morgans Hotel Group’s Mondrian brand in 2014, Tom Dixon’s Design Research Studio was tasked with the transformation – with BDG Architecture + Design and London architectural office Matheson Whiteley, meanwhile, revamping 20,000 square metres of office space above and below.

Global logistics experts Kuehne + Nagel were brought on board to ensure the smooth and seamless transportation, delivery and room-ready installation of the new five-star Mondrian London hotel’s high-end furnishing, lighting and other elements. And, as perhaps fitting the location of the Thameside building, with its history of the docks, craning, loading and so on, the relatively short journey from curbside to inside involved a feat of problem-solving and dramatic mechanics.

Construction and fit-out timelines are notoriously fluid. But Kuehne + Nagel, because they manage the entire conversation between the various contractors and suppliers, can guarantee delivery of a manufacturer’s products on site precisely at the right moment, meaning no unplanned warehousing. What’s more, they’ve more than earned their stripes when it comes to negotiating the complexities of getting goods into the right part of a live construction environment.

“At Sea Containers House,” explains Holger Altvater, Kuehne + Nagel’s Global Head of Hotel and Cruise Logistics, “delivery was, let’s say, interesting. The only access point was via the 11th floor, as construction was still ongoing from the 10th floor down. So, we had to coordinate the operation with the person who managed the construction company’s on-site crane.” This involved pallets being lifted up onto a small, vertiginous platform and then manoeuvred in through a window. All under the watchful eye of a Kuehne + Nagel senior project manager, of course.

That was only one part of the job, however. “We then had to get the consignment into the correct rooms, unpack it [the company offers a white-glove service, if needed], with the rubbish exiting the building the same way, craned down and placed into the dump.”

Not all deliveries by Kuehne + Nagel involve such derring-do, but when your goods are on consignment with Premium Project Logistics, you can be assured they’ll get to where they need to be with both creativity and lot of care.

© Architonic