Bowes Takes a Bow

FRENCH BEAUTY IN THE NORTH

 The Bowes Museum is a building on an extraordinary scale and is a major landmark in the Durham countryside. As Country Life stated in 1992: “Does anybody forget their first sight of the Bowes Museum? The short walk from the centre of Barnard Castle transports the visitor from a picturesque County Durham market town to Second Empire France...Time has not diminished the shock and delight of coming across this swaggering chateau amid the hills of Teesdale"

For over 100 years the Bowes Museum has seen an increase in both the size of its collection and the amount of archive material accumulated, which – coupled with a lack of appropriate investment in the building and visitor facilities – has resulted in inappropriate space for storage and display and the declining quality of facilities. The brief to the interior designer was clear in its intentions:” The rationale for Access to Collections [the project’s working title] is formed by the museum’s commitment to enabling the public to get much closer to the collections they own.

This requires major investment in the designated collections and the building in which it is both on display and in store. This investment will maximise the museum’s accessibility via enhanced displays and visitor friendly storage facilities, enabling its sustainability for future generations.” The project included several principal areas: 

• The entrance hall and reception
• The visitor amenities
• Life-long learning spaces
• Accessible storage facilities
• Reading room, archive and study centre

The project also provided enabling works to allow the creation of a new Silver and Precious Objects Gallery and a Textile and Dress Gallery, as well as significant improvements to fire safety and access for the disabled.

The challenge was to match the needs of a modern public facility with the constraints of a building completed in the 1890s, at all times showing empathy and respect for the original design spirit. The visitor’s experience of the building begins with the entrance hall. The two most significant additions are a new reception desk, which acts as a focal point for this very grand reception, and a new opening in matching stone beautifully executed by a local craftsman, connecting the reception to the new shop. The shop has a fully-glazed wall onto the corridor which leads past new visitor toilets to the Café Bowes.

The choice of materials has been kept simple: veined green Cambrian slate, brown oak panelling and joinery and a carefully considered palette of paint colours sympathetic to the natural stone interiors of the building and its French influences. On the lower level, two of the storage vaults have been opened up to provide new classroom facilities to cater for the very successful education and outreach programmes. Compared to the galleries they are some of the smaller, more intimate spaces in the building and have been fitted out to provide facilities suitable for children and adults. New lighting allows flexibility for different settings and displays, as well as enhancing the newly-cleaned stonework.

The provision for storage and conservation of the collections has been well short of modern curatorial standards, and during the early design stages it became apparent that the available space was inadequate. The existing store was very high (half of its volume effectively not used) and the floor, as elsewhere in the building, had no spare load capacity. The solution has been to insert a mezzanine floor supported on a deep ‘balustrade truss’, which transfers the load to the masonry walls and from which the storage racking is hung, removing all additional loading to the existing floor. This effectively has increased the storage capacity by 65%.

The central tower of the original building included a large space under a domed ceiling, referred to as the Ballroom, which was never completed at the time of the building’s original construction. The original intention was to convert the fourth-floor space into a library, but it quickly became apparent that area, too, was inadequate. Again a structural solution to the problem of the floor loading offered the possibility of increasing the floor area and the design was developed to provide a controlled-environment rare books area on the existing fourth floor, hung from new trusses – skilfully craned through the existing tall windows. A new floor built on top of the trusses provides a new reading room, thereby doubling the usable space.

For the first time users of the reading room will be able to enjoy the symmetry of the remarkable space the views south over the countryside, as well as intriguing views east and west over the Bowes roofs cape. A new lift provides access from the third floor and a spiral staircase links the rare books store to the reading room. A specially-designed carpet influenced by motifs from the collections provides a characteristic pattern and richness as a foil to the simple, uplift form of the dome. Leading the design team on a project of such a calibre and complexity has been a challenge and a once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity for lead designer Inscape Design. Said practice principal Colin Williams: “There is enormous satisfaction in knowing that we have maximised the museum’s accessibility through visitor-friendly storage facilities and enhanced displays, and enabled The Bowes to continue to be sustainable for future generations.”

The story does not stop there, however. Inscape Design is currently working on the new Decoration and Ornament Galleries, which will feature The Bowes’ unique collection of wall panelling and objects from the Tudors to the Victorians. That project is a further manifestation of the museum’s commitment to enabling the public to “get much closer to the collections they own”.

More to follow shortly from the Trustees and the Construction and Design Team, as a special one year progress case study, in our Features Section.