Six ways we are usually appointed.

This is the core of what we do and the part most clients mean when they ring us. It runs from the first conversation about what you want, through the analysis that tells us what the site will allow, to a design resolved carefully enough that a builder can price it and a planning officer can assess it.

We spend longer on the brief than most practices do, because in our experience the brief is where projects go wrong. What a client asks for at the first meeting and what they actually need are rarely the same thing, and finding the gap takes a few sessions and some patience. On Kestrel Ridge House it took a month of site work before we drew anything, and that month is why the house was consented on a plot that had been refused twice.

From there we test options rather than defend a first idea. You will usually see three genuinely different approaches, costed in broad terms, before we settle on one. Once a direction is agreed we develop it to a coordinated scheme: plans, sections and elevations that hold together, an outline structural and services strategy, and enough detail for a realistic cost plan.

Half of our work sits in conservation areas, and a good share of the rest arrives having already been refused. Planning is not an administrative step at the end of design for us; it is a design input from the first week, and treating it that way is why our applications tend to succeed.

The work usually begins before an application exists. Pre-application advice from the local authority is worth having in almost every case, and worth preparing for properly rather than turning up with a sketch. Where there is an objection to answer, we would rather answer it with evidence: verified views from the vantage points an officer will actually visit, a window-by-window overlooking study, a structural re-survey that tests whether a building really is beyond repair.

For listed buildings and buildings in conservation areas we work from the archive outward. On Chapel Street Library the 1937 shopfront drawings in the borough archive were what allowed us to reinstate arched glazing that the conservation officer would otherwise have had every reason to refuse. Research is cheaper than argument.

If a scheme is refused despite that, we will tell you honestly whether an appeal is worth running. Sometimes the answer is that the refusal is correct and the design needs to change.

Consent is not the finish line, it is roughly the halfway point. Technical design is where a scheme becomes a set of instructions precise enough that a contractor can build it for the price they quoted, and it is where cost overruns are either designed out or designed in.

We produce a full package: building regulations drawings, structural and services coordination, and the 1:5 and 1:10 details at the junctions that actually matter. On a typical house that is between forty and seventy detail drawings. It sounds like a lot until you price the alternative, which is a contractor making those decisions on site at short notice with your money.

We then tender the work, normally to three contractors, and go through the returns with you line by line rather than simply pointing at the lowest number. Once on site we administer the building contract: fortnightly inspections on smaller projects, weekly on larger ones, valuations, instructions, and the paperwork that protects you if something goes wrong.

At handover you get the building, a full set of as-built information, and someone to ring in the twelve months that follow. We return at the end of the defects period, and on most projects a year after that, to see how the building is actually performing.

Most of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing, and a great many of them are cold, leaky and expensive. Retrofit is now a third of our workload, and it is the part of the practice where the technical stakes are highest, because retrofit done badly does not just underperform, it causes damage.

We work fabric first and in the right order: airtightness and insulation before heating systems, because a heat pump in an uninsulated house is an expensive way to be cold. Every project starts with a survey of what is actually there, including moisture behaviour, and a whole-house plan even where the work will be done in phases over several years. Doing it in stages is fine. Doing it in the wrong sequence is not.

Moisture is where retrofit goes wrong. Insulating a solid wall changes where the dew point sits inside that wall, and getting it wrong buries a damp problem where nobody will see it for five years. We assess this properly, use vapour-open build-ups on older masonry as a default, and will say no to a specification we do not think is safe, including when a client has already bought the materials.

We are equally willing to tell you when a measure is not worth it. Triple glazing on a house that leaks air around every floor joist is money spent in the wrong place, and we would rather you spent it on the joists.

A short, paid piece of work at the start is the cheapest thing you will ever buy from an architect. A feasibility study tells you what a site or building will realistically take, what the planning risk looks like, and what it is likely to cost, in time to walk away if the answer is bad.

For a developer this is usually a capacity study: how many units, at what mix, with what daylight and overlooking consequences, and what the policy position is on the site. On Marrow Lane we tested six strategies before recommending the one that increased the unit count on a site that had just been refused for fewer.

For a private client it is usually simpler and just as useful: can this house take the extension you have in mind, is permitted development an option, is the wall you want to remove holding the building up, and is the number in your head anywhere near the number in the market. We would rather tell you in week three than in month nine.

We design interiors as part of the architecture rather than as a layer applied afterwards. Where the joinery, the lighting and the surfaces are designed alongside the plan, rooms tend to need less furniture and work harder, and the budget goes further because fitted elements do the job that free-standing pieces would otherwise have to.

Bespoke joinery is where this pays off most obviously. A wall of made-to-measure storage costs more per metre than a bought unit and less than the extra floor area you would need without it. We draw joinery at 1:5, specify it properly, and work with a small number of makers we have used for years, which is why the Kestrel Ridge kitchen is a single terrazzo slab rather than a run of catalogue carcasses.

Lighting is the other thing worth spending on. We design lighting layouts around what happens in a room at different times of day, which usually means fewer fittings than a standard specification, on more circuits, with warmer lamps than a contractor would fit by default.

We take on interiors commissions independently of our building projects, including in homes we did not design.