Film House, Soho: six visits, six films, one pre-launch campaign for Hines

Client: Hines Building: Film House, 142 Wardour Street, Soho, London W1F Filming: September 2025 to March 2026 Delivered: Six films, one per visit, plus social cutdowns

The problem with marketing a building before it opens

Film House is a Grade A refurbishment of an eight-storey Art Deco block on Wardour Street, the building that housed Pathé's first British outpost and later Universal Pictures. Hines secured planning in January 2024 and set about turning a tired Soho landmark into around 96,000 sq ft of Grade A workspace, with a double-height reception, a rooftop club lounge and bar, a gym, end-of-trip facilities and a basement cinema that nods at the building's history. White Red designed it. It targeted BREEAM Excellent and WELL Platinum, and it sits roughly a hundred metres from the Elizabeth line at Tottenham Court Road.

All of which is a compelling proposition, and almost none of which an occupier could judge from the pavement while the work was being finished.

That is the pre-launch problem in one sentence. The commercial case for a building is at its most persuasive in the months before it opens. That is when occupiers with a lease event coming up are drawing shortlists, when agents are having early conversations, when a scheme either enters the market's consciousness or does not. It is also the window in which the building is least presentable. So most schemes wait. They market on CGI and a brochure, then start telling the real story at handover, by which point the shortlists are already written.

Hines did not want to arrive cold. We were brought in to give Film House a presence in the market while it was still being completed.

What was actually at stake

A single-let or near-single-let outcome on a West End building of this size is worth a great deal more than the marketing budget that supports it, and it turns on a small number of conversations with a small number of occupiers. In a market where prime West End supply is tight and occupiers are increasingly buying a story rather than a floorplate, the job of pre-launch content is narrow and specific.

It is not to advertise. It is to make sure that when a leasing team gets in front of the right occupier, there is something to send afterwards that does the building justice, and that the building already means something before anyone walks through the door.

The approach: go back six times, and make a film each time

The instinct on a scheme like this is to commission one flagship film, shot late and cut once. We did the opposite. Between September 2025 and March 2026 we returned to Film House six times, and every visit produced a film of its own rather than footage banked for a single edit at the end.

Six visits, six films.

Cracking the Concept

The argument for why the building exists at all, and what Hines was making the case for in this part of Soho.

<video controls preload="none" width="100%" poster="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/cracking-the-concept.jpg"><source src="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/cracking-the-concept.mp4" type="video/mp4"><a href="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/cracking-the-concept.mp4">Watch Cracking the Concept</a></video>

Architect Design

What White Red actually did to the fabric, at the level of detail a project team or a demanding occupier will interrogate.

<video controls preload="none" width="100%" poster="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/architect-design.jpg"><source src="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/architect-design.mp4" type="video/mp4"><a href="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/architect-design.mp4">Watch Architect Design</a></video>

Refit & Gym

The amenities. The parts of a building people ask about last and decide on first.

<video controls preload="none" width="100%" poster="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/refit-gym-shoot.jpg"><source src="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/refit-gym-shoot.mp4" type="video/mp4"><a href="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/refit-gym-shoot.mp4">Watch Refit &amp; Gym</a></video>

History

Pathé, Universal, and a Soho block with more past than most new build can manufacture.

<video controls preload="none" width="100%" poster="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/history.jpg"><source src="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/history.mp4" type="video/mp4"><a href="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/history.mp4">Watch History</a></video>

A Day in the Life

What it is like to work there, which is the question the floorplan never answers.

<video controls preload="none" width="100%" poster="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/day-in-the-life.jpg"><source src="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/day-in-the-life.mp4" type="video/mp4"><a href="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/day-in-the-life.mp4">Watch A Day in the Life</a></video>

In Good Company

The street and the neighbours. In Soho, the location is a material part of the proposition.

<video controls preload="none" width="100%" poster="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/in-good-company.jpg"><source src="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/in-good-company.mp4" type="video/mp4"><a href="https://guesthousemedia.co.uk/video/film-house/in-good-company.mp4">Watch In Good Company</a></video>

Splitting the campaign that way solved three problems at once. Each film could be short, because it only had one job. Each could be aimed at a different audience, from a leasing team's opening meeting to the occupier's own project people. And the releases could be spread out, so the scheme stayed in view over months rather than arriving in one drop and then going quiet.

It also caught the building in states it will never be in again. A refurbishment reaches completion in stages, and the stages look nothing like each other: a floor with the original frame still legible next to the new intervention, a gym that is a shell one month and a finished room the next. Film it in the week it looks like that and you can show the before and the after in one cut. Come back after handover and you are describing the interesting part in a caption.

What six visits made possible that one shoot cannot

Two things came out of the cadence that a single shoot does not produce.

The first is people. Stakeholders were brought into the films at each stage, while the project was live and they were still close to the decisions being made. Get the same contributors afterwards and you get recollection. Get them while it is happening and you get the actual argument, from the person making it, in the place it is being made.

The second is ownership. The letting agents ended up presenting on camera themselves. That changes what the material is. A film the agents front is not collateral sitting on a landlord's website waiting to be found. It is something the people running the leasing campaign have a stake in pushing out, because they are in it.

How it was filmed

Everything was filmed on site, in the real building, in real light. That is a commercial choice rather than an aesthetic one.

CGI shows what a building will be. Film shows what is real now, and by the pre-launch window a great deal is already real: the volume of the spaces, the quality of the structure, the view from the roof, the street the building sits on. An occupier can tell the difference between a render and a room. When you are asking someone to commit to a lease on a building they cannot yet walk around, credibility is the whole product.

We worked around a building that was still being finished, which is its own discipline. Shoot days had to fit the programme rather than ours. Site management had to be worked with rather than around. And someone has to know which weeks will actually yield usable material, because a building can look identical for a month and then change completely in a fortnight. Soho adds its own constraints on top: narrow streets, permits, and a working neighbourhood that does not stop for a camera.

The result

The films gave Hines and its leasing team a set of assets that existed before the finished building did. Something to open a meeting with. Something to send after one. A steady flow of short-form material that kept Film House visible between milestones. And by the end, a library covering the concept, the design, the amenities, the history, the experience and the neighbourhood, rather than one film asked to do all six jobs badly.

The building went on to let in full. The entire eight-storey building went to Microsoft's UK AI teams, a landmark deal reported in May 2026 by The Times, CoStar and Green Street News, with Cushman & Wakefield and RX London acting for Hines.

We are not going to claim a film let a building. Lettings of that size are won by the asset, the location and the leasing team. What content does is narrower and worth being honest about. It makes the case earlier, to more people, in a form they will actually watch and forward, at the point when there is nothing else to show them. By the time Film House opened, it had been in the market's field of vision for months, in six different ways.

If you have a scheme coming through

The window we are describing is open right now on your project, and it closes when the hoarding comes down and the last film gets commissioned in a hurry. The months in which a building is being finished are the months most schemes never film, and they are the only months in which the story can be told as it happens rather than reconstructed afterwards.

If you have a building completing in the next 6 to 18 months, that is the conversation to have now, not at handover.

Build your quote, or send us the scheme and the completion date and we will tell you what is worth filming and when.