CAVENDISH WALK HUYTON
RIBA Stages 0-7
Unit3 Design Studio were appointed to redesign an existing commercial unit at Cavendish Walk in Huyton, transforming the former Costa Coffee premises into a new stylish café, art gallery and barbershop concept.
The project offered an exciting opportunity to reimagine a prominent retail unit within Huyton town centre, creating a flexible and characterful interior that combines hospitality, lifestyle, culture and grooming within one carefully considered commercial space. Rather than treating the unit as a standard shop fit-out, the design approach focused on opening up the existing volume of the building and creating a more memorable customer experience.
A key part of the architectural strategy was to make better use of the generous internal height of the existing space. The unit naturally lent itself to being opened up to create a dramatic double-height gallery area, allowing the interior to feel brighter, more spacious and more visually connected. This helped transform the former café unit into a more dynamic environment, with views across the ground floor and additional seating introduced at first floor level.
The proposed design combines a ground floor café and social space with an upper-level seating area, creating a layered interior that can support a range of uses throughout the day. The inclusion of an art gallery element brings cultural value to the scheme, offering opportunities for artwork, exhibitions and visual interest within the customer environment. Alongside this, the barbershop function provides a distinctive additional use, creating a destination-led concept rather than a conventional high street café.
Unit3’s design proposals explored how the different uses could work together within a single coherent interior. The café, gallery and barbershop were arranged to feel connected, while still allowing each element to retain its own identity. The design uses warm materials, textured finishes, feature lighting, planting, bespoke joinery and carefully planned seating areas to create an interior that feels stylish, contemporary and inviting.
The existing commercial unit included large areas of glazing to the frontage, providing strong natural light and visibility from Cavendish Walk. Internally, the design sought to capitalise on this by creating open sightlines, a generous sense of volume and a strong visual connection between the ground floor and first floor areas. The double-height space became central to the character of the project, helping to establish a bold architectural feature within the wider interior.
The first floor seating area was designed to provide additional customer capacity while overlooking the main café space below. This creates a more varied customer experience, with a mixture of informal seating, café tables, quieter upper-level areas and more active ground floor zones. The result is a flexible commercial interior that can support daytime café use, gallery-style events, informal meetings, social visits and the barbershop offer.
For Unit3 Design Studio, the project demonstrates how thoughtful architectural design can unlock the potential of existing high street and town centre buildings. By reworking the internal volume, improving the layout and introducing a distinctive concept, the proposals show how former retail and café premises can be adapted to support new commercial uses.
The Cavendish Walk project reflects Unit3’s experience in commercial refurbishment, hospitality design, interior architecture and adaptive reuse. The scheme creates a contemporary new destination for Huyton, combining café culture, creative display space and a stylish barbershop within a single integrated design.
Work complete
The Gallery
Images
Unit3 are an award winning multi-disciplinary design studio based in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle. We work across three design sectors (architecture, graphic design and creative media) and help clients across the UK and internationally achieve great designs.
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