The model shop
A screen flattens everything. A model at 1:100 tells you in four seconds that the roof is wrong, and clients who cannot read a plan can read a model instantly.
The place
Where the drawings happen.
Two floors above a foundry yard: a drafting hall, a model shop that makes a lot of dust, and a wall of material samples nobody is allowed to tidy. This is the room every project passes through.
Walk through it
You can fly
You can fly
through the studio.
We modelled our own building the way we model yours. Scroll the fly-through on the home page and the camera takes you in through the entrance, down the drafting hall past the service boards, around the model bay and back out again — in daylight or at night, your choice.
Take the fly-through- 2floors, one double-height hall
- 6service boards along the walls
- 14desks, all facing the light
- 1model bay, permanently in use
The space
Built for
Built for
drawing in.
We took a floor of a working foundry building in 2014 and did to it exactly what we tell clients to do: kept the good bones, opened it up, and put the light where the work is.
A day here
Nine to six,
Nine to six,
roughly.
- 08:30
The coffee and the wall
Whoever is in first puts the machine on and looks at the drawing wall. Anything pinned up overnight gets argued about before the day starts properly.
- 09:30
Desk work
The quiet stretch. Plans, sections, details. The rule is no meetings before eleven, and it mostly survives contact with reality.
- 11:00
Site or client
Someone is always out — measuring a house, walking a site with a contractor, or sitting at the long table with a client and a model.
- 14:00
The model shop
Cutting, gluing, and the smell of MDF. Every project gets built at least once in card before it gets built in concrete.
- 16:30
Pin-up
Work goes on the wall and gets picked apart by everyone, including the person who joined last month. Nothing leaves the studio without this.
- 18:00
Lights off
We do not do heroic overtime. Tired people draw badly and miss things, and someone has to pay for that later.
The craft
Three benches
Three benches
we could not work without.
The materials library
Six hundred samples, sorted by how they age rather than by supplier. You choose a stone by putting it next to the timber under the light it will actually live in.
The drawing wall
Twelve metres of pinnable surface holding every live project at once. If a scheme is not on the wall it is not really being designed yet.
The kit
Sharp pencils,
Sharp pencils,
good software.
Neither one on its own. We sketch by hand because it is faster to think that way, and we model everything because it is the only way to be sure it fits together.
On the screen
- RevitModel, drawings and schedules from one file
- Rhino & GrasshopperAnything with a curve or a rule behind it
- AutoCADBecause half the industry still sends DWGs
- Twinmotion & V-RayRenders and walkthroughs
- three.jsThe browser tours on this site, built in-house
On the bench
- Rotring 0.35The only pen anyone here argues about
- Laser cutterCard, ply and acrylic, most afternoons
- Disto and tapeNothing is drawn from an estimate
- Sample boardsA0, one per project, kept until handover
- The long tableFour metres of oak, and the best tool we own
Working here
We hire slowly,
We hire slowly,
and keep people.
Fourteen of us, and the average stay is over five years. We take one or two students each summer and give them real drawings to do, not coffee runs. If you want to work here, send us three pieces of work you are proud of and tell us why.
Come and see
it in person.
The kettle works and the long table is usually free. Bring a plan, a photograph, or just an idea you cannot shake.