A 19th-Century Glasgow Townhouse Stripped Back to Its Bones: Inside the New Arthouse Glasgow Hotel

A London interior architecture studio has peeled a Victorian Glasgow townhouse back to bare brick and timber, transforming it into a 76-room hotel that leans into the city's industrial past rather than papering over it.

A-nrd, the practice founded by Alessio Nardi in 2015 and co-led with Lukas Persakovas, led the transformation of the 19th-century listed building on Bath Street in Glasgow. The hotel is the debut property of British hospitality brand Oberland, which wanted the project to reflect its low-intervention approach to development — a philosophy of revealing rather than rebuilding (Dezeen).

The building has hospitality in its bones. It was originally converted into a hotel in 1999, operating under the name ArtHouse. The design team chose to revive that identity for the new venture (Dezeen).

A-nrd's approach was subtractive. The studio stripped away layers of previous additions to expose the building's original fabric — raw brick walls and wooden floors left visible rather than covered. The hotel's original birdcage lift (a small, open-framed elevator enclosed in metal mesh), stained-glass windows and tiled walls were carefully preserved and restored as part of the project (Dezeen).

The material palette pulls from Glasgow's manufacturing heritage. Stainless steel, zinc and dark-toned wood give the hotel's shared spaces a grittier, stripped-back feel — a deliberate nod to the shipyards and workshops that shaped the city (Dezeen).

The 76 guest rooms pair original features with bespoke contemporary additions: wooden bed frames and built-in storage designed by the studio. The detailing extends to handcrafted elements from independent makers. West House Pottery produced coat hooks for the rooms, while Glaswegian glass artist Vicky Higginson created wall lamps for some of the bedrooms (Dezeen).

Arthouse Glasgow opened in April 2026 as Oberland's first hotel, with room rates starting from £149 per night on a bed-and-breakfast basis and its smallest Pocket rooms from £99 (Boutique Hotelier).

What sets the project apart is the restraint. In a hospitality market where new openings routinely layer on theatrical flourish, A-nrd's work here is about what gets taken away. The exposed brick, the mesh-caged lift and the zinc surfaces do the talking — and the commissioned pieces from local craftspeople sit inside that raw frame rather than competing with it.

For guests, that means a hotel where every surface carries a trace of the building's two centuries — the Victorian brick, the 1999 conversion, and now a third life that leaves the history visible.