Successfully negotiating the planning process requires knowledge, experience, and tenacity, especially nowadays. It’s not enough to let a design speak for itself and expect it to sail through to a consent. We take the lead in cutting through the often-daunting web of planning policy to make sure our proposals balance our clients’ expectations with compliance. We also ensure that our spoken and written words, and visuals, form an integrated narrative aimed moving our proposals to a consent. We are confident and proven in planning authorities throughout London and the Southeast, but we think our engaged and active approach to the planning process means that our approach will bear fruit anywhere in England. We particularly enjoy any apparent planning complexity, either in terms of policy itself or a tricky physical context, where high quality and creatively sustainable design can succeed where others will often fail.

All the efforts we make, from the earliest sketches and drawings, engaging with our clients, making sure that their expectations are exceeded, count for nothing unless the finished building really substantiates the organising concept. Delight resides in how a building feels to walk around, the sense of solidity, its logic and its charm. Quality also relates to material presence and the sense that the building fabric has been correctly and proportionately specified down to the smallest detail. Poetics are all very well, but we also have a spirit of pragmatism. We cultivate openness and responsiveness to other design professionals and have enduring relationships with many of them through different projects. This ensures that functionality and efficiency are never shoe-horned into an unnegotiable design concept. We enjoy being on site, talking to contractors, getting on with them; the builder, after all, translates the abstract into the real.