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Trevor Morriss, Principal at SPPARC Architecture, is leading some of the UK’s most ambitious transformations of Art Deco and early 20th-century buildings—from the revival of London’s Saville Theatre to the reinvention of Emberton House and Ravenscourt Park Hospital.

In this conversation, Morriss shares how his team navigates the delicate balance between preservation and innovation, crafting contemporary interventions that respect the past while anticipating future needs. We discuss SPPARC’s approach to adaptive reuse, the challenges of translating historic typologies for modern life, and how thoughtful design can breathe new cultural and civic relevance into forgotten landmarks.

The Art Deco period was known for its glamour and optimism. How do you go about rediscovering or amplifying that spirit in buildings like the Saville Theatre or Ravenscourt Park Hospital?

The key to understanding that period is its craftsmanship and the optimism of the modern era. The quality of the design, detailing and materials are often celebratory and daring. Instead of pastiche, we embrace that original spirit in our design response.

Given their original uses, many surviving Art Deco buildings have a civic quality to them, which often means a great deal of generosity in terms of both space and natural lighting. We look to tap into those qualities when we’re repositioning them for alternative uses or introducing bold additions to them.

Many Art Deco buildings were designed for very specific uses—how do you approach translating those forms into something that functions for 21st-century life, like schools, care homes, or hotels?

Of course, it does depend on the individual building and the specificness of that original use. But working with rather than against that original design ingenuity, including what is nearly always a great use of structure at the time, tends to make repositioning possible. With Ravenscourt Park Hospital in particular, the meticulous thinking that went into the original plan layout and its wall-to-window ratios, as well as the opportunity for open space, meant it is translating very well into residential use.

Even Emberton House, which required comparatively more intervention because of its very particular former use as a multi-storey car park, continues to benefit from its original ribbon glazing format that wraps around the exterior, allowing in plentiful natural light in its repurposing into a luxury hotel and secondary school complete with a community theatre.

When repositioning these buildings, we don’t just look to the past, but also to the future. Fifty years from now, if someone wanted to remodel one of our re-use projects for another purpose, we have considered potential options, including the creation of soft spots constructed into the building’s structure that will allow them to do so without the need for major demolition or intervention.

With the restoration of the Saville Theatre, you’re not only reactivating a building, but also a cultural legacy. How do you approach that dual responsibility?

First and foremost, with pride. But we also understood from the beginning that honouring the Saville Theatre’s legacy by restoring its original use meant recognising that the requirements of a modern theatre have changed significantly in terms of audience and production expectation since 1931.

The theatre’s entire interior was sadly lost in 1970. wWe therefore sought to create the best modern theatre for the future in a way that respects and celebrates its heritage, rather than creating a shrine to its history.

We also wanted to make sure that we reinstated the same prominence at street level as the Saville Theatre did on its original opening. The urban grain that surrounds it has grown so much in the decades since, not just in terms of scale, but also the way in which the surrounding buildings are used at street level. The Saville simply could not match up to that in its time as a cinema and had effectively got left behind in the streetscape, despite its rich past. We are seeking to reintroduce its prominence on how it exerts itself on the street, including enlarging the original entrance volume onto Shaftesbury Avenue whilst ensuring the wonderful Gilbert Bayes frieze is restored, to once again become the most prominent feature of the principal façade.

Emberton House started as a car park — a utilitarian space — but had a major impact on design at the time. What opportunities did its reinvention into a hotel and school present, architecturally speaking?

The depth of the plan form worked well when repositioning the building. We created two new independent cores to serve each of the different uses as a school and a hotel.

We introduced an atrium through the middle of the school that follows the location of the former ramps, allowing natural light to penetrate all the way from the top to the bottom of the building. With the hotel, we have created a core in the middle of the floorplate, and effectively a donut of hotel rooms around the perimeter, optimising the format of the 1930s ribbon glazing.

How do you approach the design of new elements or extensions on historic sites to avoid mimicry, but still feel connected to the original building?

The 1930s buildings that we are working with have such depth of interest and design rigor to them. It’s not about mimicking these through newer additions but instead embedding the same philosophies behind the original buildings to inform the modern interventions. For example, this could mean taking one striking form from the building’s shape or a key detail from a parapet of the subject building and seeking to explore its geometry or materiality to inform a contemporary take that is clearly modern but respectfully belongs.

For the Saville Theatre’s hotel addition, we took inspiration from the building’s original theatre use, designing a perforated woven brick exterior that wraps around the buildings upper-level hotel addition in a way that resembles a stage curtain. The result is something that feels much more like a singular theatre language in the street, rather than a building with two very distinct uses.

It’s about having a connection to the original building rather than copying it, understanding what its contribution was and taking it from there. We always listen to what the echoes of a building’s past tell us to inform its future.

When working on these 1930s projects, how do you research and honour the original architects’ intent without getting stuck in nostalgia?

At the beginning of any project, we are like detectives looking for clues. For us, it’s about legacy, learning from that era when craftsmanship was such an important part of the design process and how we express that through materiality.

We don’t get stuck in nostalgia, but we do enjoy history and research. Researching the history of a building is vital for understanding what its future should be. With Ravenscourt Park Hospital, for example, we studied the original 1930s masterplan, which was actually never completely realised, and looked at how we could finish what was started within the constraints of the heritage buildings and available land. So, our work was informed by looking back at the history there, particularly in terms of the plan form and plan set out. But it also looks forward to what the future of those buildings should be and how they should evolve for the next 100 years.

Your projects often sit at the crossroads of regeneration and conservation. What early questions do you ask when deciding whether a historic structure can be adapted versus replaced?

Regeneration, conservation, and preservation are very different things. You always have to go through the analysis of what’s there, its significance, how you can rework it, and what the impact of that reworking will be.

Heritage considerations remain the priority; however, the question we often ask outside of heritage assets is, are you changing the building so much that you end up with compromise? Most of the time, re-use is absolutely the right answer. But there are occasions where the amount of structural change or fabric replacement to give a building a meaningful new life cycle ends up not being the most sustainable outcome, compared to if you were to replace the building.

It’s never a decision you can make without a detailed evidence-based assessment.

Borough Yards sits beside the historic Borough Market but feels contemporary. How did you use materials and form to stitch the new into such a well-worn urban fabric?

As with all of our projects, it was analysis and a thorough understanding of the context that involved immersing ourselves in the area. This meant both understanding the market and the area’s history before the market or railway was even there.

We looked at the routes and connections and what these were like before the arrival of the Victorian viaducts, which at least partly disrupted the legibility of the medieval street pattern. We sought to bring back in some of the intimacy of these lost medieval streets, with their tight, narrow lanes that open up into wider, formal spaces.

We also took a magnifying glass to the area’s existing urban grain. There’s a lot of brick that weaves everything together, from the industrial warehouses to Southwark Cathedral, and we sought to reference this through the materiality and detailing of the newer additions.

You’ve worked on everything from performance venues to hospitals to workspaces. Is there a common thread in how SPPARC approaches different building typologies?

In one word, meticulousness. It’s all about treating every project with the same level of inquisitiveness, curiosity and enthusiasm.

It’s also about challenging what’s been done before. We’re currently working on several theatres, but that doesn’t mean that the first theatre we ever did will provide us with all the answers for the next one. It just means we know the right questions to ask and where not to look for the answers.

With Olympia’s reinvention, including Emberton House, how do you design within a masterplan while still giving each building a distinct architectural identity?

At Olympia, there’s a lot of different buildings that all tell the story of Olympia and the eras that created them. We decided early in the process that the building that needed to inform the future was the original Victorian Grade II* listed Grand Hall, where the evolution of Olympia started in the 1880s.

While the masterplan itself does stitch the district together like never before, there’s also the thread of common detailing that allows the distinctive architectural identity of the Grand Hall to come through in the newer additions, such as referencing its use of pleated glass, crafted bronze and curved metal.

This allows you to read the masterplan with one identity, but an identity that is reinvented through each of the buildings, informed entirely by the heritage that already exists on site.

How do you manage the tension between the high-tech sustainability standards clients expect today and the often-low-tech nature of older buildings?

It’s impossible to separate them out. The legacy of a building’s reuse cannot be one that doesn’t meet modern regulations, or one that isn’t fit for use.

You have to look at how you can work sympathetically with the heritage assets. That could be about intervention, or it could be about bringing in technology. Regardless, it’s much more than just giving them a lick of white paint. It must be a thorough process. Instead of updating these buildings for today, you’re predicting the challenges they will face in the next 50 and even 100 years.

If you had to choose one project that best represents SPPARC’s attitude towards heritage and modernity, which would it be and why?

I think every one of our projects does. To pick one would suggest that the others don’t, which isn’t the case. At SPPARC, we pride ourselves not on having a house style but instead being informed by every site or single existing building that we work with, which means letting that building tell us what it wants or needs.

With Ravenscourt Park Hospital, for example, we are grounded by the legacy of this Grade II* listed building, which was groundbreaking on its completion in 1933. We want to make sure our additions don’t feel submissive to that, but worthy of successfully and respectfully cohabiting with the quality of our heritage.  I would like to think it is evident that all our work with heritage buildings has that approach.