Party people: Holloway Li designs a day-to-night HQ for Broadwick Live

Words: Dominic Lutyens
Photography: Nicholas Worley

When talking about Broadwick Live HQ, office of nightclub operator Broadwick Live in Canary Wharf, London, Alex Holloway, of interior architecture studio Holloway Li, likens it to another of his projects – hotel Bermonds Locke in Bermondsey. “It’s low-impact and it has quite a humble aesthetic. It doesn’t try to conceal the verities of the host structure,” he says of the latter.

Holloway, who co-founded Holloway Li in 2018, is thoughtful, analytical and opinionated. While we’ve met to discuss Broadwick Live HQ specifically, he often touches on the studio’s philosophy and expresses firm views about interior design and architecture today. He occasionally points out some of its foibles, notably an obsession with clean-lined precision at the expense of creating spaces people enjoy inhabiting. “Architects and interior designers can be guilty of trying to line everything up,” he says at one point. “I call it ‘linethroughitis’. Some architects hate walls that aren’t entirely flush from end to end but these things go unnoticed as soon as you inhabit a space. There’s a lot of artificial perfection in contemporary design, a preference among some for a precious minimalist look that’s straitjacketing.”