Where We Work

A Note on Geography

We go where the house is

We are asked often whether we work in a particular place. The honest answer is that geography has never been the deciding factor — the house is. What does change from place to place is everything around the house: which authority determines the application, how a conservation area is interpreted, whether a basement is realistic, what the neighbours can object to, and how far materials and craftspeople have to travel. We work from a main studio in London and a second office in Cheshire, and we travel from both. Those are the things we price and programme for. What follows is simply an account of where we have found ourselves working most, and what tends to be different about each.

The Places

London, the country, and further afield

Most of our work is in London, where we have a studio beside Battersea Park and a long working history with the planning and conservation teams at Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Camden and Wandsworth. The character of a commission changes street by street: the garden squares and stucco terraces of Belgravia and the mansion blocks of Knightsbridge ask very different questions from the period terraces of Chelsea, the stucco villas of Kensington, or the Arts and Crafts houses of Hampstead, where tree works and conservation designation shape a scheme before a single room is planned. In Mayfair the Grosvenor estate is part of the conversation from the beginning. Where a house has no more room to grow outwards, the answer is often a basement, which is its own discipline entirely — and across all of it, our interior architects resolve structure and layout alongside the design rather than after it. A broader account of the practice in the capital is set out on our London interior design page. Outside London, our work runs through Surrey and the Home Counties and into the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire, where commissions tend to be larger, slower and more concerned with country house interiors, country house architecture and the particular demands of listed and heritage buildings. Beyond the UK we have completed projects in Hong Kong, Dubai, across Europe and the Middle East, and further afield — usually whole houses, and often for clients we have already built for at home.

Common Questions

Where We Work, answered