Dandara Living x LOFT - Chapel Wharf, Build to Rent

Chapel Wharf is a highly sought-after development on the outskirts of Manchester’s city centre. It’s within walking distance of the shopping, bars, restaurants and the best that the city has to offer. 

Developer: Dandara Living
Development: Build to Rent | 995 Studio Apartments
Location: Manchester

About Chapel Wharf

Chapel Wharf is a highly sought-after development on the outskirts of Manchester’s city centre. It’s within walking distance of the shopping, bars, restaurants and the best that the city has to offer. 

This development was truly built with tenants in mind. The Developer, Dandara, shares the people-first mentality of LOFT, meaning that we create homes to benefit the people who will be living there. 

For Chapel Wharf, this meant an exciting development of co-living facilities and resident-friendly perks.    

The development has a variety of communal areas including a gym, lounges, co-working areas, gardens and terraces and various bookable rooms and kitchens are fun hang-out spots.

The apartments themselves were created to be as flexible as possible for tenants.  

  • There were a number of apartments left purposefully unfurnished for tenants who already have furniture 
  • All the apartments have balconies or terraces 
  • The whole development is pet friendly 
  • In the 2-bed apartments, the two bedrooms are purposefully very similar size and spec – perfect for two friends splitting rent 
  • Tenants are allowed to paint their apartments the colours they want, to make it feel more like home 

Interior Design for 800+ homes

With 859 apartments to be furnished, and the potential for them to be painted by tenants in whatever colours they wanted, the furniture had to be neutral enough to suit a range of styles. LOFT came up with two interior design styles – light and dark to best match tenants’ individual preferences. 

Though they shared a lot of the same furniture, the accessories were different to match these themes. The ‘light’ interior designs featured paler woods, light pink and cream furnishings. Whereas the ‘dark’ themes used black furnishings, with pops of yellow and a darker wood.

Challenging logistics

At over 800 apartments to be furnished, this is one of the larger projects LOFT has worked on and organisation was key to success. However, this was made even more difficult by the global pandemic which brought delays and new regulations to contend with. Not only to the interiors install, but the whole build project. 

Therefore, LOFT came to the agreement with Dandara that we would stock some of the furniture as it arrived to the country. Due to our large warehousing facilities (in London and Manchester) we were able to stock furniture for 12 months until it was ready to be installed. 

Successful installation

Thanks to LOFT’s warehousing ability and projects team able to organise this challenging install, we were able to furnish all the 859 apartments. Chapel Wharf has since won a number of awards, including the homeviews Best Development in the North West and a Gold Winner at the What House? Awards Best Build to Rent Project.

Real Resident Reviews

"Such a lovely apartment, very clean, bright and airy."

"The place is fantastic; I felt it constantly like a home where I could see myself in the long term."

"The apartment itself is great, furniture is high quality and the location is amazing"

View Our Portfolio

Find other LOFT case studies where we used our People-First design principles to create stunning interiors.