Bombay Sapphire Distillery

These Greenhouses Use Excess Heat from a Distillery to Grow Tropical Herbs and Spices that are Infused into the Gin

The design of the building comes from one of the historic mill buildings.

This is perhaps one of the coolest the greenhouses you will ever see.

Most greenhouses are incredibly boring and they serve the sole purpose of allowing farmers to continue to grow their plants, even when the temperatures begin to drop towards the beginning of winter.

These beautiful greenhouses were designed for the Bombay Sapphire Distillery in the United Kingdom by the Heatherwick stuido.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the greenhouses that you can see in the images is that they were designed in a very intuative way, where they use the excess heat from inside the distillery to be able to create a greenhouse environment outside and allow the distillery to grow tropical and mediterranean herbs and spices directly on site. Herbs and spices that are then used in their gin products.

The distillery company uses 10 different tropical and mediterranean herbs that are infused into their rum recipe that was created back in 1761.

You can see in the photographs that the greenhouses outside of the building are actually attached to the building itself, and while this does offer an appealing design for visitors to look at, it is not simply for style, but it actually has a specific function to allow excess heat from the factory to create the perfect environment for the plants.

The two greenhouses that you see are growing different types of herbs and spices that are then infused into the gin that the distillery creates. One of the greenhouses has the environment and climate necessary to grow tropical plants and other one grows mediterranean plants, using a different climatic environment.

The way that the architects and and botanists who are taking care of this setup created the environment inside the greenhouse necessary to grow the type of plants that they grow is by essentailly using the heat generated by the machines inside the distillery and by finding a method for recycling the hot air in a way that would allow them to grow the plants outside of the distillery in glass structures.

The design of the building comes from one of the historic mill buildings. The glass houses also wonderfully embeds itself into the flowing waters of the river bed.

The gardens are taken care of by a team of botanical garden experts who oversee the growth of hundreds of plants as well as herbs and spices that grow alongside the original 10 used in their recipe.

The entire process took many months to be able to completely put together including the engineering and planning process.

The structures from the building are made up of 893 individually-shaped and curved glass pieces that are held together by stainless steel frames. There are actually over 10,000 different components total that were used in creating the beautiful structure and design that you see above.

Visit: Laverstoke Mill, Whitchurch, Hampshire, RG28 7NR