Four disciplines, one office.

01

Architecture

Houses, mews conversions and small cultural buildings. RIBA Stages 0–7, drawn in-house.

We work at one scale: buildings a small number of people will use closely and for a long time. Private houses, the occasional gallery or archive, and the odd small public room. Nothing speculative, nothing where the client is a spreadsheet.

Every RIBA stage from 0 to 7 is run from this office. There is no concept architect handing over to a delivery architect, because the thing that gets lost in that handover is precisely the thing you are paying for.

The practical consequence is that the person who measures your building details its skirtings and stands on site when the plasterer arrives. It is slower and it is the entire proposition.

02

Interiors & joinery

Rooms detailed to the millimetre with our own workshop drawings.

Fitted joinery is drawn here at 1:1 where it matters — a shadow gap, a door edge, the return on a window board. Those drawings go to the maker as workshop drawings rather than as a description of intent.

We have worked with the same four joinery workshops for over a decade, two in London and two outside it. They are on the drawings by name, and they are consulted before the design is fixed rather than after.

Where a room is old we survey it in three dimensions first, because nothing in a Georgian house is the size it ought to be and a cabinet drawn to nominal dimensions will not go in.

03

Heritage & consent

Listed building applications, conservation statements and the patient conversations before them.

Seventeen listed buildings consented, one refused, and a practice that is AABC conservation accredited. We write the conservation statement ourselves rather than commissioning it, because the argument for the design and the argument for the significance have to be the same argument.

The work that decides a listed application happens before it is submitted: pre-application meetings, conversations with the conservation officer, and occasionally an amenity society. We budget for that time openly rather than pretending consent is a formality.

Consent takes as long as it takes. St Anne's Vestry took twenty-two months and four rounds with a Diocesan Advisory Committee. We will tell you that at the start, not at month fourteen.

04

Stewardship

A ten-year care agreement on every house we finish: annual survey, one visit, one honest report.

Every house we complete comes with a ten-year care agreement at no additional fee. Once a year someone from this office walks the building, looks at the things that go wrong in buildings, and writes you a short report.

It is not a warranty and we are careful not to describe it as one. It is a survey and a conversation — the point is that small failures get found while they are still small, and that we see how our own details behave over a decade.

It has changed how we detail. Three things we used to draw we no longer draw, because the ten-year reports told us they fail. That feedback is worth considerably more to us than the visits cost.

How stewardship works