Maison Dieu, Dover
A three-zone, all-electric commercial kitchen and bar delivered inside a Grade I listed building, as part of the £10.5m restoration of the Maison Dieu.A banqueting kitchen inside a Grade I listed building
Maison Dieu in Dover is a Grade I listed building, and our work there formed part of a £10.5m restoration programme. The brief was a full commercial kitchen and banqueting facility inside it: three zones, all electric, with a bar, sized to serve up to 300 covers per banquet.
Banqueting at that scale sets the whole design. Three hundred covers have to leave the kitchen close together and arrive hot, so cooking and holding capacity, the plating and service route, and the wash-up that comes back afterwards all have to be worked out from the covers figure rather than from the floor area.
Grade I is the most restrictive designation in England
Grade I listing is the most restrictive heritage designation in England, and it reverses the usual order of decisions. On an ordinary fit-out the kitchen is designed first and the building is adapted to suit it. Here the building goes first. What can be fixed to, cut into, routed through or covered over is set by the fabric and by the consents that protect it, and the kitchen has to be designed inside whatever is left.
Services are where that bites hardest. A commercial kitchen needs extraction, supply air, power, water, drainage and refrigeration, and all of it has to arrive in the same few rooms. In a Grade I building the routes those services would normally take are very often the routes you are not permitted to use, so every one of them has to be resolved individually against what the structure will allow. The kitchen was delivered all electric, which keeps gas services out of the listed fabric altogether, and across three zones, which means three sets of services to coordinate rather than one.
Public sector heritage commissions also require contractors who understand listed-building working methods, and that is about site conduct as much as drawings: what gets protected before anyone starts, how materials are moved through rooms that have just been restored, how fixings are formed and recorded, and how something found behind a wall gets raised instead of covered over. Procurement on a scheme of this size asks for all of that in writing. It then has to be true on site, alongside other trades, in a building that cannot be repaired if you get it wrong.
Designed and installed within the building's constraints
We designed and installed a full commercial kitchen and banqueting facility within the building's strict constraints: three zones, all electric, with the bar delivered as part of the same package. Design was by our CFSP-accredited directors, and every trade on site was our own, so sequencing inside a live restoration was ours to manage rather than something handed down a subcontract chain. On a heritage job that is worth more than it sounds, because the person who has to find an acceptable route for a duct is in the same company as the person who drew it.
Eight weeks, inside a Grade I listed building
Delivered in eight weeks as part of the £10.5m restoration of the Maison Dieu. The building now has a three-zone, all-electric commercial kitchen and a bar, able to serve up to 300 covers per banquet, inside a fabric that could not be altered to suit them.
Our public sector kitchen design page covers how we work with procurement teams and main contractors, and our Dover and Deal page lists other projects in the area.