Cultureplex in Manchester by Studio LOVEISENOUGH
Cultureplex is a new social and cultural destination featuring a restaurant, lounge, coffee counter, events spaces with outdoor terraces, and cinema. Located on the edge of Manchester’s Northern Quarter in the Western end of Ducie Street, Cultureplex overlooks the Piccadilly Basin in a former goods warehouse, becoming the latest of the city’s heritage buildings to take on a new purpose.
Having spent years in the hospitality, food & beverage and retail sectors where novelty is god, LOVEISENOUGH is familiar with the tricks of visual interest: juxtaposition, contrast, and collage, among others.
The interior space - akin to a public square - reveals itself as you progress from entry to the body. Inspirations include municipal spaces and Manchester’s great libraries and halls - places of democracy, community, and aspiration. Most significantly, it provides a vessel for collaboration and championing of a new era of innovation in Northern Craft. Coloration is soft and muted, grounded in tones of cream, caramel, and green with a good dose of black to clean the palette. A large central bar glows and twinkles as the heart of the room in stainless steel and terrazzo, a bespoke material by Granby Workshop, made of recycled Manchester brick that celebrates the innovation and development of Northern industry today.
Founded by Loren Daye in 2009 as a study of the paradox between efficiency and beauty, LOVEISENOUGH is a studio with an intuitive, contextual approach to interiors. The studio’s heavy emphasis on juxtaposition and contrast – the sublime alongside the banal, refinement softening decay, austerity in sublime detail – serves as an organizing principle. Loren is interested in the place where formality and order acts as a foil to disaster and romantic despair. As a consequence, LOVEISENOUGH puts fluid, adaptive and unconventional thinking at the core of its process. A desire for experimentation alongside an insatiable appetite for research and sourcing encourages projects to unfold with spontaneity, discovery. Forever seduced by the desolate and marginal, her travels have resulted in an exhaustive archive of original imagery and reference from which she culls.
Courtesy of Studio LOVEISENOUGH
All images by Andrew Meredith
