British designer Thomas Heatherwick has overseen the completion of a new distillery for gin company Bombay Sapphire in Laverstoke Mill, Hampshire – England. The project included the renovation of a cluster of existing red brick buildings and the addition two glasshouses where the ten botanicals – juniper, lemon peel, grains of paradise, coriander, cubeb berries, orris root, almonds, cassia bark, liquorice and angelica used to produce the unique taste of Bombay Sapphire are grown and are on display. The complex includes a sophisticated heat-recovery system for the five stills and some of the recovery systems feeds heat into the new double greenhouse center piece of the distillery. The giant structures extrude out of the gin house and act as part of the visitor experience to showcase the botanicals in both their tropical and Mediterranean climates. The structures have been constructed using seven hundred and ninety three unique pieces of glass which were developed in collaboration with Kew Gardens.
The two hectare site is sixty miles from London and comprises an impressive conglomerate of fourty buildings which showcase fine examples of Victorian and Edwardian architectural styles.
For more than two hundred years, Laverstock Mill produced high quality paper for the bank notes of England including bank notes for India during Queen Victoria’s reign and it was this heritage which brought together the story of England, Laverstoke Mill, India and the 1761 British recipe for Bombay Sapphire gin.
Thomas Alexander Heatherwick, CBE, RDI, HonFREng is an English designer who founded the London-based design practice Heatherwick Studio in 1994
