If you’re familiar with London’s Nine Elms district that’s probably because you’ve seen it grow from the ground up over the past two decades. But if you’ve paid any attention to the redevelopment, like me, you may feel like something’s missing.
Walking on the northern perimeter of Embassy Gardens, up Nine Elms Lane and in line with the Thames, there’s a gaping span of earth that reveals the US Embassy, partially enclosed by the development’s towers that arc around it, from east to west.
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It’s a gap developers Ballymore will close with The Capston, the final piece of the Embassy Gardens project. The name is not an accident; the capstone is the final stone laid, which locks an arch or crowns a wall. It’s the piece that makes the structure beneath it – or in this case surrounding it – make sense.
The last stone in Ballymore's vision for Nine Elms
The Nine Elms regeneration zone is the capital’s biggest regeneration project since Canary Wharf transformed the docklands in the 1990s, and certainly a generation-defining example of urban masterplanning, just as high-rise, labyrinthine sprawl typified London’s post-war Sixties.
Battersea Power Station’s complete renovation into a mixed-use commercial, retail and residential estate is perhaps the most symbolic image of the Nine Elms regeneration, but really, Embassy Gardens is its most meaningful development.
Embassy Gardens is anchored, famously, by the relocation of the United States Embassy, which dragged the whole neighbourhood’s centre of gravity southward and gave Nine Elms a reason to exist beyond the developers’ renderings.
The 15-acre, Sir Terry Farrell-masterplanned site isn’t an unknown quantity in itself, but this ribbon of former industrial land between Battersea Power Station and Vauxhall is one most Londoners, until recently, knew only from a train window.
Ballymore has shown an almost monastic resolve in turning this into something not just public and usable again, but the first real neighbourhood of the entire regeneration zone.
At a glance, today, the bustle around the manicured pathways and water features that trim a strip of restaurants, bars and delis opposite the US Embassy suggests this may well be true. But time will tell, and in 20 years this venture in urban planning could take on a whole new meaning.
How to make a first impression
When you step into the suite, you’re immediately greeted by an object that seems faintly embarrassed to be doing a commercial job – though it is, just as plainly, a piece of art. This, I will come to understand over the next hour, is the building’s entire proposition. But for now it’s a slab of ceramic that’s stopped me on my heel, which – I suspect – is rather the point.
So is it objet or unfinished? Neither: it’s a concierge desk, made by French ceramicist Fabienne L’Hostis in raku ceramic – a technique that cracks the clay’s glaze at a high heat, allowing it to pool in patterns no one can choose, nor ever repeat.
L’Hostis probably spent months crafting this – a single, one-off design, created to fulfil a function, never to be replicated again. But it will, as this is just a scale model. The real thing will be bigger, more intricate and certainly more likely to make you forget the conversation you’re about to have with the concierge standing behind it.
De’ath is not what I expected. Any group’s marketing leader is crucial, yet the discipline is underappreciated. Most stick to the script, but De’ath is disarmingly warm; you sense why he’s been entrusted, just two years after joining, with carrying Mulryan’s legacy forward.
In the lobby’s anteroom, De’ath’s enthusiasm matches mine. We talk about how strange his job has become. Real estate marketing has to keep pace with a technology cycle that reinvents itself every 18 months – the renders, virtual walk-throughs, drone licensing, the immersive everything.
He explains: “The ambition was always that every element – from the architecture down to a door handle – had to earn its place.”
“Working with Bryan O’Sullivan gave us a through-line, a design sensibility that held the whole building together as a single, coherent piece. That consistency is what separates something that feels designed from something that feels assembled, or like an overblown marketing exercise.”
The personalised intro, then, is indeed a feint – the last flourish of theatre before the argument for substance is made.
Art as alpha
The deeper we go, the clearer the building’s organising principle becomes, and it is not a conventional one. At The Capston, art is not decoration applied at the end. It is the thing the building is arranged around – the alpha, the first principle.
That conviction comes from the top. The Capston is the personal project of Sean Mulryan and by De’ath’s account, total and granular in a way that is almost unheard of at a founder level.
“What sets The Capston apart from anything else I’ve worked on is the level of personal investment from Sean and John Mulryan,” he says. “Their hand has been in the detail at every stage, and it shows.
“The lead times on commissioning the art, the craft pieces, Bryan O’Sullivan’s interior work – it’s the kind of obsession that’s extremely rare in this industry, no less from the chairman and CEO. I felt it the moment I joined, and it shows in what we’re building here.”
You can read that obsession in the names. Stuart Suckling’s stained glass, set as a concave oval into the ceiling of the marble lift and, at larger scale, flooding the foyer with pastel light. Vincenzo Muratore’s figurative sculptures in the transition spaces.
Anna Gillespie’s bronzes in the gardens. Fabienne L’Hostis again and again. This is not the usual practice of buying in a few inoffensive canvases to fill wall space; it is a curated collection, integrated into the architecture, championing established and emerging artists alike.
Bryan O’Sullivan – whose hospitality work at Claridge’s and The Connaught gives him a particular fluency in the language of arrival and atmosphere – provides the connective tissue, a sensibility rooted in the mid-twentieth-century masters that resists trend in favour of something that feels collected over time.
The Capston's show suites
Upstairs, in the show suites, the philosophy is brought to life in several ways. This is where a prospective buyer makes their choices, and the choices on offer are a long way from a swatch book.
A kitchen island of Arni Fantastico marble – dramatic, theatrical, veined in black and white like a thing still half-liquid. There is burl wood, its grain swirling into itself; pippy oak; walls finished in hand-applied Venetian plaster that catches and softens the light.
In the bathroom, his-and-hers marble sinks face one another, and the bath, shower and WC are each given their own frosted-glass enclosure. In the kitchen, a downdraft extractor draws steam downward and out of sight, so that the ceilings can run high and clean without the intrusion of a hood.
It is here that De’ath returns to the desk that stopped me at the door.
“Fabienne L’Hostis’s concierge desk is an excellent example of the project’s approach to singularity in design,” he says. “It’s a piece of raku ceramic, a firing technique that produces genuinely unrepeatable results. Every surface is unique. You wouldn’t believe the time it took just for this one piece – but a scaled version of this exact design will make its way into the main lobby on completion.
“We could have specified something far more conventional and no one would have blinked. But Sean especially hasn’t been interested in the path of least resistance, and he’s allowed the process to take months – the commissioning, the iteration, the back and forth. I look at it and know it’s worth it. It’s the difference between a building and a place.”
The invisible architecture
Not all of the obsession is on display. Much of it, in fact, is engineered specifically not to be seen – and this turns out to be the part De’ath is most quietly proud of.
“There’s a tension in a building like this between openness and privacy, between the theatre of arrival and the practicalities of daily life,” he says. “Getting that balance right was genuinely complex. The Porter’s Lodge keeps deliveries out of the main foyer entirely. There are discreet areas to handle correspondence.
“The service infrastructure is completely invisible to residents unless they need it. None of that happens by accident – it’s the result of a lot of careful thinking about how people actually live, not just how a building photographs.”
It’s too-the-point. The hidden downdraft, the separate porter’s entrance, the choreography that keeps the courier and the resident from ever crossing paths – these are not features you can photograph for a brochure.
They are the unglamorous infrastructure of a luxury that works. You only notice them by their absence of friction.
Broken ground
We end at a window. Below us, where the towers will rise, is raw earth – the site freshly excavated, hoardings up, the build only just begun.
It’s a strange thing, to have spent an hour walking through the fully realised vision of a place and then to look out at the bare ground from which it has yet to climb.
Yet everything I have touched – the marble, the glass, the impossible desk – exists, for now, only as intention. The capstone is not yet laid. But I have seen its shape, and I have met the people who will not let it be laid carelessly.
I think of the desk again on my way out. A scaled version is coming. By the time it arrives, the building around it will finally have caught up.
