In 1965, the Farrell/Grimshaw Partnership were asked to design a new London hostel for overseas students, to be run by the International Students’ Club Ltd. The brief was to convert a group of six Victorian houses into a hostel for 170 students. The architects’ solved the problem of providing bathroom facilities into a very restricted area by designing an innovative tower in conjunction with the company ‘Integral Plastics’. The result was a tower of glass fibre reinforced plastic compartments providing 30 pods of bathrooms, showers and toilets, plus six additional pods fitted with a washing machine and sink instead of a bathroom. The tower was built behind the row of houses, with connections to each floor of the main building. The innovation avoided the need to retro-fit adequate plumbing into the existing buildings, but had the additional benefit of enabling architects to provide more bathroom facilities than would otherwise have been possible. The arrangement also meant that students could enter the bathroom tower from any floor and then walk up or down the spiral ramp to find an unoccupied pod – an improvement on the traditional grouping of bathrooms at the end of hostel floors.

Interior design features for each bedroom included a multi-purpose trolley storage system, mounted on castors and could be wheeled around. This solved additional space restraints within the building.