Blog

Three pieces of news from the studio, all of which have been quietly in progress for most of the year.

A workshop, at last

We have taken the unit next door and turned it into a samples and prototyping workshop. It is not a joinery shop and we are not becoming makers, but it gives us something we have wanted for a long time: the ability to build a mock-up.

What it will be used for:

• Full-size mock-ups of joinery details, so a shadow gap can be looked at rather than argued about
• Wear testing on materials, which we have been doing on a windowsill for eleven years
• The sample library, properly housed and properly lit for the first time
• Client presentations with actual materials at actual size, rather than a board of chips

The immediate effect has been on our detail drawings. Building a junction at full size reliably reveals one thing the drawing did not resolve, and it has already changed our standard details in two places.

Two people joining the technical team

Marcus Reyes joins as a technical designer from a hospitality practice in San Diego, where he spent five years detailing bathrooms at a volume most of us will never see. He will be working on the technical package across the commercial projects.

Priya Raman joins as a junior designer straight from her degree, having spent her final year on a thesis about adaptive reuse of mid-century medical buildings, which is a subject we happen to care about a good deal.

Both start this month, which brings the studio to nineteen.

A studio grows well when it hires for the gap rather than for the backlog. Both of these appointments fill something we knew we were short of, rather than simply adding capacity.

The detailing seminar is now open

Albert has run an internal detailing seminar twice a year for most of a decade, and taught a version of it at a local design school. From this autumn we are opening it to anyone working in the field.

Two days, twelve places, covering joinery drawing conventions, tolerance, junctions between trades, and how to write a specification a contractor can actually price. It is aimed at designers in their first five years of practice, and at anyone who has ever received a drawing back from a joiner with six questions attached.

Dates and details will go up on the contact page shortly. The first session is likely to be oversubscribed, and we will run a second if it is.

And a note of thanks

The workshop and the hires are both a consequence of a good year, which is a consequence of clients who came back and clients who recommended us. Ninety-two percent of our work last year came from one of those two sources. We do not take it lightly.

Getting in touch

If any of this is relevant to a project you are planning, the studio takes on a small number of seminar places and a larger number of houses. The contact page has both. We answer every inquiry, usually within two working days, and we will tell you plainly if we are the wrong practice for what you are trying to do.

What else is coming

Two pieces are in draft for the autumn: a long account of the San Pedro conversion, written up properly with the plans, and a guide to briefing a designer that Emily has been threatening to write for three years. Both will appear here first, and both will be considerably longer than this note.