Digging a basement can double the cost of an extension, but giving it a clear purpose – and celebrating the way you enter it – can make it the best room in the building.

On the evening of the day we bought our engagement rings in 1996, Deborah and I went out to celebrate. Clutching our left hands in a fist in case the rings fell off, we headed for Mezzo on Wardour Street in the centre of Soho. Mezzo was a Conran restaurant, one of a new generation of eateries that combined good food with mass dining, a world away from the stuffy places London was better known for at the time. It had been converted from the former Marquee Club a year earlier and featured what would become a defining element of Conran’s restaurants: a powerful sense of arrival.

 

The restaurant (now known as 100 Wardour Street) was in the basement, a notoriously difficult space to make feel amazing due to the lack of light and low ceilings. Conran’s answer was to design one of the most famous staircases of its time: a sweeping white sculpture in the middle of the room, with the kind of metal handrail more commonly found on an ocean liner. It was the perfect width for two people to walk down side by side.

 

This was Conran’s stroke of genius. You would dress up to go to Mezzo simply so that you could glide down the staircase like Fred and Ginger, under the gaze of hundreds of fellow diners – each of whom had already enjoyed their own moment on the catwalk. You went to Mezzo not just for the food, but for the spectacle of that stair, the sense of arrival that made you feel like a million dollars.

 

That memory has stayed with me throughout every basement project we have designed. It is our job to make the basement the best room in the building and to give it a clear purpose. Given that clients may spend up to twice the usual cost of an extension to excavate a basement, it would be a waste to use it solely for storage and utilities.

 

Instead, the staircase to your basement should create that Mezzo-like sense of arrival as you sashay down to your own after-hours Shoreditch bar, fully equipped spa or gym, or private Soho cinema. It should feel like an invitation rather than a barrier. At Conran’s restaurants, the prices and the aura of glamour were the barriers to entry, but once you were ‘in’, everything about the journey through the building was effortless – and that’s exactly how digging down should feel.

 

Andrew Mulroy

Mulroy Architects, December 2024