How Gabriel Chipperfield beautified Bayswater

Placemaking, the art of curating communities and cultural hubs around new developments, can have many origins. For property developer Gabriel Chipperfield the idea of turning a Bayswater backstreet into a fashionable spot began with the need for a good cup of coffee. “I’d just started work on a residential project in Leinster Terrace, which looked great on paper: it has period architecture and is around the corner from Hyde Park and Paddington,” recalls Chipperfield, 36, who is the son of Pritzker Prize-winning architect David Chipperfield and who co-founded the property development firm Wendover Partners with Saul Sutton and Jan-Paul Coelingh in 2022. “But I looked around one day and thought, if we don’t do something with the street this is not going to happen. There was nowhere to grab a coffee or to take clients when they had a viewing.”

Chipperfield noticed a “for rent” sign in the window of the bureau de change across the road and an idea took hold. “They were only looking to sublet space and my colleague told me to forget it, we’re not in the money exchange business, but my heart kicked in – I knew I could do something interesting.” The owners agreed to the idea and thus was born Foreign Exchange News, a money exchange, coffee shop and luxury newsagent housed in a wood-lined space that attracts a vibrant clientele such as EE72 co-founder Edward Enninful and Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson.

A Mediterranean wine bar, deli and bottle shop (Sol’s) followed that same year, offering sandwiches and salads by day and small plates in the evening. The big central table inside the restaurant is run by chef-patron Harry Farrow and serves its own rosé wine, produced in Tuscany. But the venture was not an overnight success. “It was meant to be a deli but the community very quickly came back and said, ‘We want a good place to eat and drink,’” says Chipperfield. “The deli aspect flopped – we had a lot of wastage and had to reinvent ourselves – but we have no problem listening and acting on it. We opened last July and did more business in the first three days of July/August this year than we did in the whole of July and August last year. It’s really nice to see it’s working.”

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Sol’s in turn led to the opening this year of Sol’s Sister, an adjoining florist that transforms into an event space. “We are not there yet but see this as our own mini-estate,” says Chipperfield. He points next door to a skate shop. “That’s really cool,” he grins. “We want to use it as an experiment.” The end game, he says, “is not about money spinning but placemaking”.

Placemaking is nothing new. The idea of designing urban space for humans rather than cars took hold in the 1960s, and the term describing the process of creating buzzy, people-centric districts gained traction in the ’70s. What used to be the domain of urban planners, however, is now deemed an essential strategy in property development. It’s no longer good enough to fill a building with people, you need to curate a vibe around it. This, of course, has less to do with civic duty than the eventual payoff: it is much easier to fill developments in pleasant surroundings where shops, restaurants, schools and creative spaces are on the doorstep. Not all get it right: the development of London’s Elephant and Castle has led to heavy criticism of extreme gentrification and placing profit over people. King’s Cross, meanwhile, with its glass-encased offices, dining destinations and art college, Central Saint Martins, is widely viewed as a success story.

Chipperfield has a sentimental attachment to Leinster Terrace. “I grew up nearby and would walk here every day to get the bus to school,” he says. “I bought my first pair of skates here. I have fond memories of the place, but also lamented that things hadn’t progressed in a positive way. Charm is one thing but run-down is another. I try to preserve character in something new. I think society deserves a bit of luxe,” he adds. “I like the idea of contrast – of making a newsagent’s look like a million dollars.”

This “residential experiment” is part of the wider regeneration of London’s Bayswater area. Jeremy King’s The Park restaurant is just around the corner, as is The Whiteley, the mixed-use development within the former Grade II-listed department store that is the cornerstone of a £3bn regeneration project. Apartments there start at £1.5mn and September saw the opening of its first restaurant, Nela. According to estate agent Savills, such investment, along with the opening of the Elizabeth Line, is having an impact on prime-property values. The median price per square foot in Bayswater was just over £1,300 based on 2022 sales. That figure is behind the average of almost £1,800 elsewhere around the park, but represents an increase of around a third over the past decade.

“Past evidence tells us that central London regeneration, done well, can unlock value barriers,” says Katy Warrick, Savills’ head of London residential development research. “Take Marylebone, where outperformance of the wider prime central London market can be partly explained by its investment in the public realm, retail offering and local community.”

Chipperfield is thankful for a private equity partner who agreed to sink “a couple of million” into retail ideas that “might not make money”. In reality, the projects are commercially successful. His residential property on Leinster Terrace, which sparked his own retail splurge on the street, is still under construction, and is to some extent another calculated experiment: he’s building just nine large apartments rather than packing in smaller properties. “I didn’t want to compromise on lateral living space,” he says of the arrangement of several flats across the building, which offer the space of a multi-storey house (priced from £5.9mn).

Chipperfield has become a master of cool interventions. In 2020, when running his design studio Selected Work with wife Laura de Gunzburg (daughter of arts patron Nathalie de Gunzburg), he collaborated with Sandeep Garg, owner of Marylebone newsagent Shreeji on Chiltern Street, to transform it into what was then dubbed “the hangout du jour” – a café, reading room, and occasional salon for events and exhibitions.

In 2018, he joined forces with Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover and artist Tom Gidley to purchase a dilapidated 19th-century rooming house in Margate. The now chic 14-key Fort Road Hotel is perched beside the Turner Contemporary art gallery, which was designed by Chipperfield’s father David’s architectural practice and which opened its doors in 2011 as part of a broader effort to regenerate the town. Since opening, the gallery has welcomed more than 4.5mn visitors and contributed some £100mn to the Kent economy. Chipperfield junior and his business partner Coelingh had been working in Margate from 2017 to 2019 to build a studio for the town’s prodigal daughter Tracey Emin, who has done much to spark her hometown’s renaissance from sleepy seaside town to cultural hub.

“It was lovely working with Gabriel and the team on my sculpture studio – he has a very good sense of materials and design,” says Emin of their friendship. “We often help each other by talking about small details. And Gabriel has a very good sense of humour. He calls me aunty.”

Chipperfield’s firm Wendover has just completed the restoration and extension of the former St John’s Wood police station into nine boutique apartments, based around a central courtyard concept “inspired by European modes of communal living”. He’s also been in talks with London estates such as Portman, Cadogan and Grosvenor – all landowners practising placemaking long before it became a buzzword, who are investing in pockets of the city (Grosvenor, for example, is one of the entities behind the £500mn South Molton scheme).

Leinster Terrace has become a shop window for Chipperfield’s company. “This is the last place you would think of when investing in retail, which is what is attractive,” he says. “If it works here, it could work in a lot of other places.” He and his firm are now working on a new intervention. The expansion of The Perimeter gallery in Bloomsbury will include office, retail and restaurant space, and a new hospitality project on Savile Row will deliver a café concept with a “curated retail” element. For Chipperfield idiosyncrasy is key. “There’s a direct negative correlation between retailers that make money and those that are interesting,” he continues. “Bring in nice little retailers and the rest will follow.”