Bathing Beauties Design Competition
Bathing Beauties was a design competition to provide a new restaurant and lifeboat station for Chapel St Leonards.
The scheme uses the repetitive beach hut form combined with the atmospheric context to create a contemporary architecture on the Lincolnshire coastline. We felt it important to draw on the idea of the traditional beach hut, as historically they have played a very important part in seaside Britain and many are now being demolished.
The scheme uses a group of three, large, beach hut forms cast in wood shuttered concrete to express the wooden grain. This texture creates the impression of the forms being cast and preserved in a way that represents those years when seaside Britain was truly alive. The three forms are fused and staggered to form open plan dining space and terraces on the first floor, along with lifesaving facilities, tourist information and a 'snack shack' on the ground floor. These forms are then wrapped in a mesh envelope in a way that helps emphasise the hut forms as a sculptural form in a display cabinet, whilst also offering more functional properties required by the brief, such as resistance to vandalism. The circulation and lookout tower are contained within a separate form that allows for seasonal detachment from the restaurant.