Albert Malfoy

Albert co-founded the studio after eleven years in interior architecture, most of it spent on hospitality projects where the detail had to survive a thousand guests a month. He brought that standard with him and has never really relaxed it.

Detailing as a discipline

He owns the studio’s technical output: the joinery drawings, the finishes schedules, the junction details that decide whether a room reads as designed or assembled. His sets are drawn at a scale where a shadow gap is a decision.

• Joinery drawn in elevation and section, with every board thickness named
• A standard details library the whole studio works from
• Tolerance notes for every junction between two trades
• Sign-off on every tender package before it leaves the office

Why he draws so much

Albert’s argument is economic rather than aesthetic. A maker who receives an ambiguous drawing prices the ambiguity, builds a guess, and then charges again to change it. A complete drawing is priced once and built once.

Every question a joiner has to ask you on site is a question you failed to answer on paper. The drawing is where the arguments should happen.

He teaches a detailing seminar at a local design school twice a year, largely because it forces him to justify conventions he would otherwise follow out of habit.

Albert keeps a notebook of construction failures photographed on other people’s sites, which he insists is the most useful document in the studio. Nobody has been able to argue with him about it.