Trellik Design Studio Packs a Co-Working Hub, Café, and Workshop into 124 Square Meters of Victorian Shell

Most co-working spaces trade on square footage: the more desks, the more subscriptions. Trellik Design Studio took the opposite approach. At just 124 square meters spread across three floors and a mezzanine, One and a Half Co-Working Studio in De Beauvoir, East London, proves that a tight footprint can hold a café, an events space, a natural fabric dye workshop, a library, exhibition space, and private offices, all without feeling compressed. The trick lies in section, not plan: a building that steps, splits, and perforates its way through a Victorian shell that has been a nuts-and-bolts workshop, then a photography agent's office, and now something considerably more ambitious.

Jean Dumas, founder of Trellik, bought the building in 2019, and the renovation completed in 2021 reads less like a commercial fit-out and more like a manifesto for circular construction at a neighborhood scale. Salvaged lightboxes become LED fixtures. Old floor joists become shelving. Kitchen countertops are made from recycled terrazzo by Foresso. Pendant lights are grown from seaweed. The material palette is calm, almost domestic, punctuated by jolts of cobalt blue and cornflower steel that give the project a personality most co-working interiors never develop.

A Victorian Frame, Barely Disguised

The entry sequence sets the tone immediately. Exposed yellow timber trusses are left unadorned overhead, framing grey doors and pendant lights that hang at a domestic height. Trellik stripped the building back to its bones and then chose, carefully, what to add. New roofing and insulation were applied externally so the interior rafters could remain exposed, a decision that preserves the proportions of the original structure while vastly improving thermal performance. It is a smart inversion of the typical insulation retrofit, where character is usually the first casualty.

At the entry level, ribbed glass panels and timber cabinetry with black hardware create a threshold that is intentionally low-key. There is no reception desk, no branded wall. The architecture does the talking.

Cobalt Blue as Circulation Logic

The cobalt blue staircases are the most immediately recognizable element of the project, and they earn their prominence. In a building this compact, vertical circulation is not background infrastructure; it is the connective tissue between every programmatic zone. Painting the stair treads, risers, and railings in a single saturated hue turns them into a wayfinding device and a spatial landmark simultaneously. You always know where you are relative to the blue.

The open-riser staircase beside one of the timber desks allows light and sightlines to pass through, keeping the lower levels visually connected to the floors above. Where the stairs meet at a shared landing, potted plants and even a drying rack appear, signaling that this building is genuinely inhabited, not staged. The mezzanine's cornflower blue perforated steel panels extend this color logic into a horizontal plane, filtering daylight from the skylights above down to the workshop below.

The Perforated Mezzanine and Sectional Play

The laser-cut perforated steel mezzanine is the project's structural and conceptual centerpiece. Suspended within the double-height volume, it serves as a breakout space, library, and rotating exhibition venue for local not-for-profit initiatives. Its perforations are not decorative: they allow natural light from the skylights to reach the sunken maker's workshop on the ground floor, solving a daylighting problem that solid construction would have created.

From the upper co-working level, the mezzanine reads as a blue metal railing and a view down into the activity below. The stepped section plan creates overlapping sightlines between floors, so tenants working at plywood desks can glance up from their screens and see an exhibition being installed or a fabric dye experiment in progress. Cross-pollination is not left to chance; it is engineered into the section.

Material Intelligence on a Modest Budget

Trellik's material strategy is remarkably disciplined for a project with so many recycled and bespoke elements. The kitchen counter sits against a white tile backsplash with open timber shelves holding potted plants, a composition that could read as generic café fitout if not for the Foresso recycled terrazzo worktop and the locally crafted joinery details. Every surface was either retained from the original building or sourced through a network of local craftspeople, artists, and suppliers.

Repurposed floor joists reappear as the open timber shelving on the upper floors, displaying framed artwork, material samples, and books against textured plaster walls. Valchromat cupboard doors provide color without paint. ReFelt acoustic panels, made from waste plastic, double as pin-up surfaces for the designers and architects who share the space. The result is a palette that feels warm and coherent rather than precious, a material story told through restraint and local knowledge rather than an expensive sustainability certification.

Details That Signal Care

The smallest moments often reveal the most about a project's ambitions. A wall-mounted sink with a black faucet sits beneath a yellow niche on white square tile, an orange towel providing the only accent. It is a bathroom detail, hardly the stuff of architectural photography, yet it communicates the same color confidence and material honesty that defines the entire building. The yellow niche is a minor gesture with major effect: it transforms a utility alcove into something intentional.

Similarly, the ribbed glass door panels beside timber cabinetry balance privacy with transparency, a recurring theme in a building where public café space, semi-public exhibition areas, and private workspaces all share a single compact envelope. Trellik understands that in 124 square meters, every detail is doing double duty.

Why This Project Matters

One and a Half Co-Working Studio is a quiet rebuke to the generic co-working model. Where most shared workspaces rely on uniformity and scale, Trellik builds specificity and intimacy. The project demonstrates that adaptive reuse at the smallest scale, a single Victorian building on an East London street, can produce architecture that is spatially inventive, materially responsible, and genuinely rooted in its community. The collaboration with local joiners, artists, lighting designers, and material innovators is not a marketing strategy; it is the design method.

For architects interested in circular construction, the project offers a useful case study in sourcing discipline. Nothing here is exotic or imported at great expense. Seaweed pendant lights, crushed wine bottle glass fixtures, recycled PET acoustic panels: these are products that exist now, at accessible price points, and Trellik deploys them with enough design intelligence that they read as considered choices rather than sustainability props. The lesson is that small projects, tightly conceived, can carry as much architectural argument as buildings ten times their size.

One and a Half Co-Working Studio by Trellik Design Studio. De Beauvoir, East London, United Kingdom. 124 m². Completed 2021. Structural Engineer: Jero Works. Main Contractor: HMT Building Services Limited. Photography by Trellik Design Studio.

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