Process
Five slow steps
Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test
We begin by listening in the room as it is: where the morning comes in, which chair nobody sits in, the door that sticks in July. A brief is mostly a set of constraints to be heard before anything is drawn. The useful visit usually happens in the wrong weather.
Then we edit the brief down to the one thing the project must do: not a list of rooms, but a condition, such as a kitchen that holds a whole family at seven or a gallery that can go quiet between shows. What is left out is written down as deliberately as what stays.
Options are drawn in plan and section at the same hour of the day, so they are compared honestly rather than by which rendering flatters them. We work in quantity first, then keep the two that still make sense after a night's sleep.
Before a detail is built, it is made: a mock-up at full size, a corner of joinery, a handrail in the actual timber, a wall sample moved around the room until the light has been seen on it. A model is allowed to look unfinished; it is there to answer a question, not to persuade.
Rooms are tested the way they will be lived in: walked through at dusk, sat in, opened and closed a hundred times. What fails goes back to the drawings, because the process is a loop, not a line. A room is finished when it has stopped asking to be changed.