Merchant Quarter

Merchant Quarter is a 12,500 sqm mixed-use development on Bristol's Harbourside, occupying a prominent corner site between the historic docklands and the city's expanding commercial district. The project comprises ground-floor retail and restaurant spaces, five floors of flexible commercial floorplate, and two upper floors of residential apartments.

The massing strategy responds to two quite different urban conditions: the fine-grained Victorian streetscape of the Harbourside to the north, and the larger-scale commercial buildings of the city centre to the south. The building is articulated as two interlocking volumes, each scaled and expressed to respond to its immediate context.

The facades are clad in hand-laid engineering brick, with bronzed aluminium window frames and deep reveals that provide solar shading to the south and west. The ground floor is designed as a permeable colonnade, allowing the public realm to flow through the building and creating sheltered external space for the café and restaurant tenants.

The residential apartments on the upper floors benefit from double-aspect layouts and generous terraces overlooking the harbour. Each apartment has been designed to the standards of the London Plan despite the Bristol location, with accessible layouts, high-quality specification, and bicycle storage as standard.