Kelvin Works

Kelvin Works

By: Rowan Thackray
In: Commissions Industrial
2 min read
A bottling and distribution hall for Bellhouse Distillers — the kind of building nobody photographs properly, in a year when it won two awards for exactly that reason.
ClientBellhouse Distillers
ArchitectCorrigal Studio
Other collaboratorsStruan Engineering, Redgorton Works (fit-out)
Completed2025
PhotographedJanuary 2026
A long low industrial building in vertical timber cladding and profiled metal with hills behind
From the approach. Two hundred metres long, and it does not read as it.
A stainless bottling line lit by a clerestory band above
The line, mid-shift. Lit entirely by the clerestory.
Nobody photographs a bottling hall properly because everybody assumes it is a shed. It is not a shed. It is a two-hundred-metre room with a clerestory, and it deserves the same day a gallery would get.
A glazed mezzanine office looking down over the production hall with one person at the rail
The mezzanine. Everyone in the office can see the floor, which was the brief.
A tall orderly warehouse racking bay lit by a rooflight strip with a forklift at distance
Racking, eleven metres. The rooflight strip runs the full length of the aisle.

The clerestory runs the whole length and the machinery is stainless, so the hall lights itself: nothing was brought in, and the only real decision was which hour to be standing on the centreline. That is unusual. Most industrial interiors need a van full of heads and a compromise, and the reason this one does not is a section drawing somebody argued for three years ago.

The junction where timber cladding meets a metal rainscreen in raking sun
Timber to rainscreen. The only frame here that wanted sun.
A staff entrance and canteen with timber, planting and daylight
The staff entrance. This is the frame the client uses for recruitment.