Design shaped around how you live

Every home starts with a person, not a plan. Clients often come to me asking for plans - it is the thing they expect an architect to produce, and it feels like the natural place to begin. But a plan is an answer. And an answer produced before the question is properly understood is only a guess.

So before I think about drawings, I want to understand how you actually live - your routines, what you value, what's not working about the space you have, and what a change might let you do differently. I listen attentively to your ideas and why they matter to you, because those reasons are what a good design has to answer. The plan comes later, and it comes more easily, once we understand what it needs to achieve.

Most of my work is residential - extensions, loft conversions, new builds and refurbishments for people adapting or creating a home in London, and North London especially. The scale varies enormously; the approach doesn't. Each decision is shaped by how you want to live, with close attention to light, proportion, material, and the particular context of your house and street.

This way of working matters most on the most demanding projects. On one recent commission, a family had bought a former glass factory and wanted to make it their home. The building had a history and a character worth respecting, and the family had a clear sense of how they wanted to live within it. The work was in reconciling the two - honouring what the building already was while adapting it to a family's life, adding what was needed without erasing what made the place worth keeping. That kind of reconciliation cannot be rushed. It comes from listening carefully, understanding what matters to the people who will live there, and having the patience to resolve each decision properly rather than settling for the first answer that works.

I'm less interested in imposing a style than in arriving at something that feels right to be in - calm, well-proportioned, easy to live with, day after day and over years. A home should support your life quietly rather than announce itself. Much of that comes down to removing unnecessary complexity, so that what remains is coherent, considered, and built to last.

The brief is different every time. The intention is constant: a home that reflects who you are and continues to feel right long after it's finished.